


Running with Scissors

by Sorrel



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen, Local Woman Conquers the Commonwealth... again, also this is basically just the 'warrior queen and sworn knight' trope, dressed up in another genre's clothing, there's an outline though!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-26 08:13:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 32,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30102930
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sorrel/pseuds/Sorrel
Summary: Sixty years after leaving the vault for the first time, Sole wakes up once more to a world she doesn't recognize and has no choice but to set right.  This time, however, she's on her own, with no allies except a brainwashed bodyguard and a secretive freedom fighter with her own agenda, and no direction save for a mysterious mission from her son.  Working against the clock, with every day ticking closer to her own demise, Sole will have to follow the clues, figure out her objective, and find a way to save the Commonwealth - and, hopefully, herself.(This is an abandoned WIP, posted under WIP amnesty along with an outline of the rest of the story.)
Relationships: Female Sole Survivor/X6-88
Comments: 6
Kudos: 3





	1. The Actual Opening Chapter

**Author's Note:**

> This is technically an AU of my Sole from [Dogs of War](https://archiveofourown.org/series/833607), though you very much don't need to read that in order to understand this. The salient bit, the thing that sent me off down this fucking rabbit hole, was this bit from [chapter 13 of Cry Havoc](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5305667/chapters/37776458):
>
>> "Fucking idiot," she says, almost to herself. "Always had to play the goddamn hero. I was right there, I had a scalpel up my sleeve and a clear shot at that asshole's back, ten more seconds and I would've been out. But he wasn't a soldier—didn't think, just reacted. He fought back, and they killed him for it." Another pause, only the rusty saw of her breath in her throat to fill the silence. "I couldn't save him."
> 
> And I was like huh. What _would_ have happened if she'd made it out of the pod in time? For a while I thought the story I wanted to write was about her and Kellogg - who I think are a lot more similar than either of them would be happy to admit, and probably would've gotten along like a literal house on literal fire if there hadn't been the whole vengeance thing in the way - but then I realized that what I really wanted to look at was the idea of ripple effects. How drastically things could change if someone had thrown a big enough rock in the pool all the way back... but how quickly they could revert, too, if the wrong person got into the wrong kind of power. (Why yes, I _was_ processing a lot of feelings about the American political landscape, why do you ask?)
> 
> Anyway, as you can see from the tag this is, in fact, an abandoned WIP. The only part of the story I actually "wrote" is the first chapter, which basically establishes the AU, and then I never managed more than an outline of the rest. But it's a really, uh, _thorough_ outline, for what it's worth. Clocking in at around 26k words, it covers the rest of this story as well as the hypothetical sequel, spanning all the way across the Commonwealth to Far Harbor and back to the Collective for the final confrontation. There's an emotional arc - multiples, even! - there's a plot, there's a conclusion, there's even an epilogue, I did the whole shebang. And I eventually had to admit it was never going to be more than what it is, so I'm setting it free.
> 
> Also, the codename "Bishop" for a de-fridged Barbara was shamelessly stolen from the incredible [Women's Work](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11432244) by Tinwoman, which was a huge inspiration for how this story eventually came together.  
> 

Conrad had a bad feeling about the mission from the start.

For one thing, he hadn't had the best experience with vaults. Too much crazy shit had gone down in those; you could never predict what you were walking into. Despite what some of those eggheads tended to think, he wasn't stupid, which meant he didn't go into missions blind if he could help it. (Which was why he was still alive and doing their goddamn dirty work for them, but what the fuck ever.) Cracking the seal on a vault was pretty much the definition of 'going in blind,' no matter what fucking records someone found in a database somewhere.

For another, it was a goddamn babysitting mission. The only thing worse than going in blind was going in blind with some useless fucking civilian, and Institute civilians were the worst of the bunch. Not only were they bone-stupid with anything that didn't involve a microscope, they were also missing even the smallest flicker of self-preservation. They'd be running ahead one moment to study some goddamn flower, and the next they'd be flinching and cowering from a fucking mouse or some shit. Even city folk were better than this, and Conrad goddamn hated city folk.

Still, things were going pretty smooth so far. Doc Callaway might've been one of the folks that thought surfacers were little better than animals, but she was nervier than most, which made his job easier. Plus, they'd relayed straight to the vault doors, so the only trouble they might find was inside. And, wonder of fucking wonders, those pre-war records had turned out to be right for a change: the only thing they found was exactly what they were looking for, which were the rows and rows of little pre-War idiots frozen like bugs in amber.

Only problem was, there weren't so many of them as the eggheads had figured.

"There was a power surge about forty years ago that disrupted the monitoring software," Callaway explained absently, fingers flying over the keys. Conrad couldn't help but be impressed with how fast she was going, considering the ridiculous fucking hazmat suit she was wearing. "When that went offline, the system automatically started the resuscitation process. The autonomous release mechanism was improperly configured, so without someone around to open the door…"

"They suffocated to death." He'd figured as much; a couple of the little windows were covered in scratch marks. Hard death, that. "So what you're saying is, this trip was a bust."

"Not quite." Callaway straightened from the keyboard, impatiently nudging her hood back into place when it threatened to slide, and pointed down the hall. "That way. The last hall filled, apparently it was never hooked to the main system. They should still be frozen."

"If they were the last ones in, they probably got cooked pretty good on the way in," Conrad pointed out, stepping ahead of her and sweeping the hall. They hadn't seen so much as a goddamn radroach so far, but you just never fucking knew, did you? "Wouldn't that mess up your precious samples?"

"Not really. It takes repeated exposure or multiple generations to cause the kind of genetic warping we're trying to avoid, and the pods do have a rigorous decontamination procedure. As long as they didn't grow up next to a toxic waste dump, they should be more than sufficient for our purposes."

"I'm sure they'll be thrilled, Doc."

Even through the suit, he could feel the icy look she gave him. "It doesn't matter how they _feel_ about the matter, Mister Kellogg. That's why you were brought along."

"And here I thought it was because you were so scared of the big bad Commonwealth you needed a safety blanket," he said, amused. "Good to know I'm good for something after all."

"Sarcasm is beneath you."

"Nothing's beneath me, according to your boss. I figured that was part of the appeal." He held up his hand, causing Callaway to draw up short, and then sighted around the corner. "Clear."

"Of course it is," she said, brushing past him. "Nothing's been down here in a hundred and fifty years."

"That you know of," he told her back, but she was already at the monitoring console, typing merrily away and not listening to a word he said.

"Ah, much better. Green almost across the board. Stable, stable, stable… Equipment malfunction here, but he was an old man, no loss there. Stable, stab… Oh." She paused, hands going still on the keys. "A _child_. This one has a child."

Conrad had been working for the Institute for a long time, now. Normal folk, he'd expect some kind of horror, disgust even: children were precious on the surface, and the thought of shoving one into some freezing metal tube for the sake of an experiment was repugnant. Even Conrad found it a little distasteful.

But he knew better than to expect normal human emotions from someone like Callaway, so he said, "That's good, huh?"

"Oh yes. Better than we could have hoped for, really. Look at this, an _infant,_ only six months old."

_Christ,_ Conrad thought, but said nothing, just waited with folded arms.

"Male, name of… Shaun, apparently," Callaway said, tip-tapping away on the keys. "Part of the Duvall family unit: father, mother, infant son. It looks like their berth was purchased by the state."

"Soldier?" He hoped not; soldiers tended to think they could handle themselves no matter what came along, and their egos that made 'em fight like hellcats even when surrender was the only smart option. You had to be careful, with someone who thought of themself as a soldier.

"No, a private contractor of some kind. He's probably what passed for a computer scientist in those days. Apparently the military was hiring them in droves by the end."

"What about the other one?" Conrad believed in covering his bases. " _She's_ not a soldier, right?"

Callaway shrugged, pulling up the file. "Nora Bennett, twenty-eight years," she read off. "Five feet nine inches, one hundred thirty-seven pounds. No occupation listed, so probably a housewife. Interesting that her name is different, isn't it? I thought women mostly changed theirs back then. Maybe it was a recent marriage."

"Sure," said Conrad, who didn't care, and jerked his chin at the console. "Go ahead and fire 'er up, Doc. I don't want to be down here longer than I have to."

It only took a minute to get the pods up and running. Conrad made sure he was in place, waiting, when Callaway came over to pop the seal. She gave his unholstered gun a disdainful look, which he returned with interest. The hell did she think he was here for, fetch and carry? Who the fuck knew what'd happen when that thing opened up?

Coughing, apparently. "What-" was about as far as Duvall got before his lungs rebelled in a fit of ugly, wracking coughs that made the kid stir and mutter in his arms. It went on for a long time, long enough that Callaway was just about tapping her toe with impatience by the time Duvall finally managed to get enough air to croak, "What happened?"

"You just exited suspended anim-" Callaway caught Conrad's look and cleared her throat. "We woke you up," she amended, and then added, in what she probably thought was a soothing tone, "You're safe now."

From the way Duvall frowned and clutched the kid tighter to his chest, he was a long way from being soothed. "Are you with Vault-Tec?"

"Something like that," Conrad said, when Callaway failed to come up with a reasonable answer on her own. Apparently she hadn't figured on actually having to _talk_ to any of her 'genetic donors,' which was about the level of planning and forethought he'd grown to expect from these idiots. "The doc's here to check you over."

"Yes, exactly," Callaway said, and held out her hands for the kid. "Let me check your little one first, and then we can do you next."

Duvall didn't seem very soothed by this gambit, either, frowning between her and Conrad, clutching his son to his chest with reflexive protectiveness. Conrad cursed silently to himself. Even scrunched up in the confined space of the pod he was a big man: well-fed, broad-shouldered, with hands like friggin' dinner plates. Big enough that Conrad couldn't risk tangling with him, not with that baby in the mix. And he clearly wasn't a coward, unfortunately for him. He was going to be stubborn, and Conrad was going to have to shoot him, and then Winters was going to lecture him, _again,_ about 'unnecessary violence.' Fucking hell.

Duvall's gaze flickered around the room, like he was looking for some sort of escape, and Conrad's hand tightened on the revolver… But then he slumped, those big shoulders stooping in visible surrender, and nodded almost imperceptibly. Enough for Callaway: she swooped in like a vulture to claim her prize, and Duvall only hesitated a moment before he handed over his son into her waiting arms.

She immediately took him away to the corner where she'd set up her kit, murmuring something that sounded sweet but was probably horrifying if Conrad could actually hear the words coming out of her mouth. Duvall stepped out after her before Conrad could stop him - god damn it, getting him back in there was going to be a bitch - but then he paused, clinging to the pod door. There was an alarmingly gray tinge to his face, and Conrad eyed him askance.

"You're not gonna throw up, are you?"

"No, I'm- no." Duvall looked a lot less certain than he sounded, which wasn't very. He was also swaying slightly, like a dead tree in a radstorm. "I'll be fine, I just need a, a minute. Who are you, anyway?" he added, with renewed vigor. "You're not Vault-tec."

Conrad cast a quick look at Callaway, but she was preoccupied by muttering at the baby and had completely lost any interest in the father now that she'd gotten her mitts on the son. "We're, uh, independent contractors," he prevaricated. "There's not much of Vault-tec left."

"I'm not sure if that's good or bad news, considering how we ended up here." Duvall had a nice voice, now that the hoarseness was fading; deep and warm, with a wryness to match the smile lines cut deep around his clever hazel eyes. "So it's been… a while, then."

"Yeah."

"How… much of a while?"

There really wasn't any way to soften it. "Hundred fifty years, give or take."

"A hundred and fifty _years._ " Duvall closed his eyes, absorbing that blow with a moment of struggling silence that made Conrad wish someone else was here to deal with this. God damn it, he killed people, not talked 'em through their fucking problems. "But there's still… people? Alive, out there?"

"Here and there."

"And they're… still human?"

"Occasionally debatable," Conrad muttered, with an ironic look at Callaway. "But yeah, there's still humans. Came out of vaults and stuff. They-"

Duvall had played his part well: Conrad almost didn't hear the hiss of the pod release over the sound of his own goddamn yammering. As it was, he was just too fucking slow. In the split second it took to turn and aim, those big fuckin' dinner-platter hands were on his chest and shoving him back with all of Duvall's considerable strength. Conrad stumbled _hard_ , cursing under his breath, and fell against-

-a lean, muscled body, only a little shorter than himself, damp with melted frost and smelling like antiseptic and cold. "Well hello there," a low female voice said in his ear, and before Conrad could so much as think about moving his free hand was twisted up behind his back, a booted foot hooked around his ankle, and - mother of _fuck_ \- something cold and metallic was laid against the side of his throat. "Sweetheart, you know what I said about making new friends."

Duvall grinned. It was so fucking infectious, Conrad almost found himself smiling back. "You know me, honey. I always have to try to talk it out."

"I promise, darlin', you really don't." Conrad's captor - Nora Bennett, presumably - shifted her weight, locking Conrad down even more securely. Knew what she was doing, too. Starting to seem like she'd done this sort of thing before. "But good job stalling him."

"Hey, my big mouth's gotta be good for something. But you did hear him before, right? They're not Vault-Tec, and they don't want us. They're after Shaun."

"Yeah, I heard. A hundred and fifty years, huh?" This was apparently addressed to Conrad, judging by the way she wiggled the blade against his neck. "I'm guessing they still have knives in the future?"

From what he saw earlier, Vault-tec had stripped them before they put them in their fancy little freezers, so if she had a blade on her she must have palmed it and hidden it up her sleeve. Which wasn't the behavior of any goddamn housewife he'd ever heard of, _Callaway._ This would be the last goddamn time he listened to a scientists about jack or shit, that was for fucking sure.

"Yeah, yeah, you got me." Like the greenest goddamn scavver, she had him. Fuckin' shameful. "What do you plan to do with me?"

"Well, for starters, I'm going to need you to hand me your weapon."

"I do that, nothing to stop you from slitting my throat and leaving me to the roaches," he said, with a resigned look at Callaway. Goddamn egghead was frozen up like a radstag, totally useless. "You could understand how that's not my idea of a good time."

"Mine either, but you could understand how that's not exactly my problem." She'd definitely done this before. There was none of the nervous stress you'd expect from a first-timer, just a kind of easy calm, like they were shooting the shit over a couple of beers. "Also, if you _don't_ give me your gun, I'm definitely going to do that anyway. The odds ain't exactly in your favor."

"Look, this went downhill pretty fast, but that doesn't mean it has to stay that way." Callaway opened her mouth with what he could only assume was the reflexive need to be the center of attention, then caught his gaze and snapped it shut again. "We can talk this out. Negotiate. Maybe everyone walks away with what they need."

"And what is it that you need, Mister...?"

What the hell. "Kellogg. Conrad Kellogg."

"Nice to meet you, Mister Kellogg," she said, and the hell of it was, she actually sort of sounded like she meant it. "So tell me: what _are_ you hoping to get out of this situation, exactly?"

Conrad took a moment to consider the specifics of his mission parameters, turning an idea over in his head. It wasn't the standard play, that was for fucking sure, but wasn't that why they paid him the big bucks? Robots weren't too good at adapting to situations on the fly, but Conrad, he was flexible. And he'd be _damned_ if he made it all this way just to lose it all to some goddamn pre-War relic with a scalpel and a grudge.

"All I give a shit about is walking out of this fucking vault," he sighed, easing his finger off the trigger. Callaway gave him a look of pure betrayal, but he ignored it, flipping the revolver around in his hand. "And I want my gun back when you're done with it."

Bennett laughed, her chest shaking against his back. "Oh, I _like_ you," she told him. "Sure, slick, that sounds like a fair trade to me. Hand it over and we'll get this party started."

"Mister Kellogg!" Callaway cried, but Conrad was holding up the gun for Bennett to take.

"Sorry, Doc," he told her, enjoying himself more than was probably fair. "But I'm not looking to get my throat slit for your science experiment."

" _God_ , it's good to meet a fellow professional." Bennett grabbed his gun and stepped back in one smooth movement, keeping it aimed straight at center mass. "Alright, pretty sure you know the drill. Face down, kiss the pavement-"

"-hands behind my head," Conrad finished, suiting action to word. "There's cuffs in the back right pocket, by the way."

"Much obliged. Honey, can you-"

"Yeah, got it."

Duvall moved off in Callaway's direction, but Bennett kept her attention on Conrad, patting him down with his own revolver steady and cold against the base of his skull. Conrad lay still and breathed in musty cement and antiseptic, tracking the progress of Bennett's brisk pat-down with a certain amount of rueful appreciation.

"You know, I'm getting the feeling you've done this sort of thing before."

"Less than you'd think," she said, as she worked. She relieved him of the cuffs, his clutch piece, and both boot knives, but if she found the picks he had hidden in his cuff, she left them out of professional courtesy. "When I was in the army there wasn't much call for taking prisoners. Mostly I just killed them."

A fucking soldier. Did he call it or what?

"Well, I appreciate the restraint."

"Don't send me the fruit basket just yet, champ. We're not done yet."

_No,_ Conrad thought, _we're really not,_ and activated the emergency beacon.

The world disappeared in a flare of white light, cutting off Bennett's shout of alarm. When it reformed around them Conrad was already moving, taking advantage of her moment of distraction to roll her under him, gun hand pinned up over her head. When he opened his eyes again, it was to find her staring up at him, her damp hair shockingly red against the white institute tile.

He watched her glance around, taking in the change in their surroundings, the mob of security droids flooding into the room. Watched the calculations play out on her scarred, freckled face, flickering through her options like pages of a book. Watched as she came to the inevitable conclusion.

"Well, shit," she said disgustedly, "that's cheating," and went lax in his grip.

Conrad laughed as he took back his gun, climbing laboriously to his feet. "Welcome to the Institute, Miz Bennett," he told her, sliding his revolver back into the holster with a fond pat. "You know, you were right about one thing: it _is_ nice to meet a fellow professional."

###### 

**SIXTY YEARS LATER**

###### 

The watcher on the hill saw the hunter as he approached the vault.

It was almost a miracle that she spotted him at all. It was very dark still, a few hours before dawn, and with his mottled gray coat the hunter blended almost perfectly into the forest, just another large shadow among all the rest. But when he broke past the treeline and crossed the ridge to the doors, the clouds parted just long enough to let a stray piece of moonlight escape, and for a moment he was highlighted starkly in silver, a towering figure of dark menace alone on the empty hilltop.

The watcher hissed and dropped the binoculars, ducking down sharply into the blind. There was no noise from down below, and after a moment she sighed, exasperated. Of course there wasn't - she was too well-hidden, too far away for even _his_ enhanced ears to pick up such small noises of surprise. The watcher eased back up over the edge and looked once more down at the hunter below.

He was investigating the doors, pacing around the edge in a steady, measured stride, studying the locking mechanism. After a minute of this consideration, he nodded sharply to himself and divested himself of his pack, setting it down by the doors and vanishing into one of the nearby trailers. All was silence and stillness for another minute, and then there was a rumbling groan, and the massive vault doors slowly began to part.

The watcher observed through the binoculars as the hunter emerged from the control booth and approached the newly-opened doors. He bent to retrieve his pack, slinging it carefully over his shoulders, and then stepped onto the platform and touched something on his wrist. The platform descended, the hunter disappearing from view, and then the great doors slowly groaned closed once more.

"Holy _shit,_ " Bishop breathed. The binoculars dangled around her neck, forgotten, as she fumbled for a cigarette and lit it with shaking hands. "Well, we're screwed."

###### 

X6-88 fucking hated dealing with vaults.

Tactically speaking, he disliked going into a potentially live combat situation with only one point of egress. Morally speaking, Vault-Tec was a cancer of a corporation, and their experiments repugnant to anyone of sense. And _personally_ speaking, X6-88 had always hated going underground. Who could live like that, down in the dark with fake lights and fake air and a thousand tons of rock over your head? Vault-dwellers were even more warped than wasters, in his opinion, and that was fucking saying something.

There wasn't anything down here but corpses and the occasional radroach, but he kept alert anyway. Partly from habit, and partly because his intel brief had been hastily pulled together, and something might have been missed. Just in case, he disposed of the radroaches with a security baton rather than risk the noise of his rifle, although it took some quick stepping to stay clear of the resulting mess. Giant insects. Christ, but he hated the wasteland.

Nothing else arrived to liven up the mission, and so he arrived at the pod bay irritated but unmolested. He set his pack carefully near the door and then, after a moment's consideration, his rifle, too. His instructions had been very clear: he was not to present himself as a threat in any way, lest he accidentally provoke… how had Father put it? 'An unfortunate misunderstanding.' Given the circumstances, an armed stranger would probably be pretty goddamn provoking. And besides, if worse came to worst, he could always subdue her manually until she calmed down enough to listen to reason.

It wasn't hard to find what he was looking for; there was only one only occupied pod. The glass was frosted over, blocking his view, but as he ran the reactivation protocol, the frost gradually flushed away, giving him a clear view of the woman inside.

He'd expected… well, he didn't know _what_ he'd expected, actually, but it wasn't this. The legendary Commander Bennett looked like an ordinary woman in her mid-forties: smile lines around her mouth and eyes, silver just starting to thread through her long red hair. Aside from the scars on her face and the offensively blue vault suit, she could've been any synth in outprocessing, waiting for activation.

_Harmless_ , he'd say, if this were anyone else. But X6-88 had read her file, and just her _recorded_ combat experience was nearly triple his own. 'Harmless' was the _last_ fucking word to describe a woman like that.

God, he couldn't wait to meet her.

"Decontamination complete," the speaker announced, in a crackling, blown-out voice, and X6-88 stepped aside to allow the door to lift unobstructed. The pod hissed open, cold air billowing into the damp confines of the pod bay, and X6-88 became aware of his pulse pounding in his ears. This was it. After all these years, he was finally-

A hand shot out through the half-opened door and locked into place around his throat. "And just who," the commander demanded in a hoarse animal snarl, "the _fuck_ , are you?"

Well, shit.

In another triumph of intellect over instinct, X6-88 didn't deploy any of the dozen or so counter-moves that his training immediately suggested. Yes, she was precariously balanced half-in and half-out of the pod, but her grip was well-executed for all its speed, and he wasn't getting out of it without doing critical damage to at least her wrist, probably also her shoulder. And since Father's instructions had been very specific about the use of stimpaks, he couldn't risk that kind of injury at this stage. The commander had a very reasonable question, and she'd left him enough breath to answer, so he'd try that first.

"X6-88, ma'am," he said, as calmly as possible past the constriction on his throat. Damn, she was strong. Not courser-strong, obviously, but definitely stronger than human, or even an unaltered synth. That sure as shit hadn't been in her file. "I'm here on behalf of Dr. Duvall."

"Prove it."

Father had warned him she'd require more than his word. "Look down at my left wrist."

She stared at him for another moment, as if trying to assess whether or not it was a trick, and then flicked her gaze downward. Her eyes widened fractionally, and she looked again, slower this time, evaluating.

"That's my Pip-boy."

"Yes, ma'am."

"Shit. Sorry." Her hand dropped away, and he could breathe freely again. "You okay? I didn't hurt you?"

"No, ma'am. No apologies necessary." Without her grip on his throat to stabilize her she was wobbling slightly, and X6-88 hastily grabbed for her as she stumbled over the lip of the pod. "Please be careful. Dr. Duvall said your sense of balance might be temporarily impaired."

She hesitated, pride warring with common sense, and then a wracking shudder hit and she clung hard onto his steadying arm, fingers biting into the thick fabric of his sleeve. "Dr. Duvall was fucking right. Jesus." She swayed slightly, her eyes wincing closed against the murky glare of fluorescent lights, and rubbed her scarred forehead fretfully with her free hand. "And I thought my first time out was bad."

"Dr. Duvall said your condition might be exacerbated by the decryolization process."

"Dr. Duvall's been saying a whole friggin' lot, apparently." She straightened with a wince, her hand falling away from his sleeve. He waited to see if he'd need to grab her again, but she seemed to be regaining her equilibrium. "He must trust you a lot."

There was a thread of question there, a demand that went beyond her simple statement. X6-88 wished he had a better answer for her, he really did. But the ways of Father were beyond him at the best of times, and this situation was… not that.

"I'm his personal guard, ma'am," he said - answering her spoken question, if not the rest. "I've been entrusted with his safety."

"But he's not here."

"No, ma'am."

A pause. "Do you know _why_?"

"I… couldn't speak to that, ma'am."

"Because you don't know, or because he ordered you not to tell me?"

X6-88 cleared his throat. "I'm under strict orders to answer all of your questions with complete honesty and to the best of my ability."

"So you have a good idea, but you don't want to speculate," she concluded.

Her file had said she was smart. "As I said, ma'am, I'm just his guard."

"Uh-huh." She studied him up and down, a slow drag that seemed to take in much more than just his weapons and uniform. "Well, you talk a good game, soldier, but you have to know I'm not going anywhere with you until you can give me one good reason I should take your word for it."

_Soldier._ He felt a rill of pleasure run down his spine at the casual epithet. He'd worked so hard, and for so long, and to have Commander fucking Bennett take one look at him and call him _soldier_ in that casual tone of voice-

But now was very much not the time, so he only extended his arm again, the one with the Pip-boy still attached. The weight made for an ungainly encumbrance against his usual sense of balance, but he'd treated it at the priceless treasure he knew it to be. "Dr. Duvall recorded you a message, ma'am."

Far from the eagerness he expected, the commander regarded the device the way an uneducated wastelander might a poisonous snake. "Do you know the contents of the message?"

"No, ma'am."

"Are you lying?"

He cleared his throat, unaccountably awkward. He wasn't used to humans accusing him of deception. Most of them seemed to think he wouldn't know _how._ "No, ma'am."

"Well, that's disappointing."

His gaze shot to hers. She was looking back at him, almost amused.

"You'll never get anywhere if you don't take some initiative," she advised. "And carrying a message you don't know is a good way to end up as a shot messenger."

"Ma'am," he murmured, for lack of anything else to say. This was _not_ going the way he'd anticipated.

"And I was hoping you could summarize it for me," she admitted. "Get an idea of what I'm walking into. Ah, well."

If that's what she needed, X6-88 could provide. "I could listen to it now, ma'am."

"Nah, it's fine. Might as well get it over with." Gingerly, she unsnapped the buckle from his wrist and eased it down over his hand. He found himself regretting the glove, which was not normally a thought he ever had out in the wasteland: she seemed to be paler than even her complexion could justify but the sturdy synleather made it impossible to tell if she was chilled or not. Her hands were steady, at least, and familiar on the buckles as she settled it on her own wrist and snapped it closed. The tape was already loaded into the device; all she had to do was press play.

"Hello, Mother," Father's voice came from the little speaker, and the commander _slammed_ her hand down on the button, halting the playback.

"On second thought," she said, so calmly that X6-88 might have believed nothing was wrong if he couldn't see the minute tremble in her fingers, "maybe it can wait until we're out of this hellhole."

"Very good," X6-88 murmured, though curiosity gnawed at him. He didn't much want to stick around this place either. "I prepared a fallback site at the nearby town, if you'd like to go there now."

Her gaze sharpened abruptly on his face. "In my old house?"

"Ah- no, ma'am, a campsite nearby." Her profile said that she preferred to sleep out from under cover when weather permitted; X6-88 had to admit he didn't entirely see the appeal but he liked the idea of trapping himself in a building with no secondary exit even less. "Unless you'd rather-"

"No! God, no. Sleeping out sounds like just what the doctor ordered." Her gaze strayed to the cracked and mildewing ceiling. "It'd be good to see the stars again," she added more softly, and X6-88 remembered something else that had been in her file: Commander Bennett was claustrophobic.

What must it have taken, he wondered, for her to come down here and climb into that pod of her own volition?

"Anyway." She shook that away with a toss of her head, and then when that failed to dislodge the lock of hair stuck damply to her forehead she wearily lifted a hand and scraped it away with her fingers. "Let's get out of here."

She made as if to take the lead, and X6-88 hastened to get out ahead of her, scooping up his pack and rifle. "Please let me take point, ma'am."

She raised an eyebrow. "Are you implying I can't defend myself against, what? A radroach?"

He hoped his wince wasn't visible. "Of course not, ma'am. But Dr. Duvall tasked me with your protection-" _For as long as she'll tolerate it,_ had been Father's exact words, but X6-88 was willing to stretch the definition of 'tolerance' pretty damn far, if he had to. "-and I wouldn't be much of a guard if I let you take point with no weapon."

"You could give me your rifle and fix that," she pointed out, neatly identifying the hole in his argument he'd been hoping she wouldn't notice.

"If that's your order, ma'am, I will comply."

Her eyebrow winched higher. "Meaning you think it's fucking stupid but you don't think you can get away with stopping me so you'll just have to say 'I told you so' when it goes tits-up."

This time he knew he didn't manage to keep his surprise hidden; he'd never met a human who could understand courser double-talk. He considered prevaricating, then looked at the amusement lurking in her glass-green eyes and just went for it. "Of course not, ma'am. I'd never say that out loud."

Her crack of laughter filled the room. "You're alright, X6," she told him. "Fine, then, you can take point. I'll stay back like a good civilian."

_X6._ It was the logical diminutive, and one that had been used many times before, by scientists who either couldn't remember or couldn't be bothered to use his full ident. But somehow when she said it, it sounded like a nickname, the kind of thing that humans gave their comrades.

It made him reckless. "You can have the rifle tomorrow, if you want."

"I'll take you up on that," she told him, amusement drawing creases at the corners of her eyes, and clapped him on the shoulder. "Lead on, soldier."

"Of course, ma'am," he said, and bit back his satisfied smile as he moved ahead of her towards the door. "I'm at your disposal."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here concludes the part that's actually _written_. What follows next is a scene-by-scene outline of the rest of the story, complete with most of the dialogue and all of the emotional beats. I tried to keep the formatting as clear as possible, but it was ultimately written for myself so there's probably some places where the pronoun antecedents and dialogue tags get a little confusing. Sorry in advance!


	2. What Happens Next

Sole waits until they're out of the vault and in the relative safety of the abandoned town before she puts on the Pip-boy and listens to Shaun's message, X6 doing his best not to hover nearby. In it Shaun apologizes for not coming in person, saying that things have changed in the Collective since she left it in his care, and not all for the better. Things have grown… complicated, of late, and he needs her help. Unfortunately, he can't explain why, not when there's such a risk it might be intercepted. He needs her to seek the Oracle beneath, and she'll understand everything then. To aid in her mission, he sent her his best soldier. (In the background, X6 straightens imperceptibly, quivering with pride.) She can trust him implicitly, even if the rest of the world tells her otherwise. And whatever she may hear, out there in the wastes… he hopes she knows that he loves her very much. That he's missed her every single day of the last twenty-nine years, and he's counting the hours until he'll see her again.

She's still for so long afterwards that even X6 seems to get a little concerned: ma'am? Are you alright? No, she says, a little distantly, I am not alright. I am, in fact, dying. Do you know that? Does _Shaun_ know that? Because it sort of seems like he might have forgotten that. She stabs angrily at the eject button, her fingers shaking: he can't just pull me out of storage and throw me at his problems! I'm his _mother_ , not a fucking wind-up toy!

She grabs the holotape and flings it off into the distance. X6-88's gaze follows it, no expression on his face, and regret hits her a moment later. Fuck, I didn't mean to do that, she says blankly. X6 offers to get it but she gets up to find it, X6 trailing uncertainly after her. It landed in a patch of deep grass, and she kneels down to comb through and find it. Starts talking almost randomly about how Sanctuary used to be her satellite base, did he know that? She and her partner set it up, a safe place to relay into and out of. Because - well, there used to be a relay, back when it was the Institute, she doesn't know if he knows that. She picks up the holotape, turns it over in her hands, keeps rambling absently. And then afterwards, while they were building the Collective, it was a good staging ground, a kind of secondary depot where they stored stuff, had people who could feed you and treat your wounds, that kind of thing. Her old robot butler used to run the place. Christ, she wonders what happened to him-

X6-88 isn't listening, she realizes after a moment; his head is up and his attention fixed elsewhere. Sole loses some of her momentum to puzzlement, waves a hand in between them. X6, buddy, you with me? I was sort of in the middle of something here. We're not alone, he tells her, low-voiced, his gaze fixed on the treeline, wait here, and then he takes off in a blur. Sole rolls her eyes, shoves Shaun's holotape in her pocket, and follows.

###### 

Bishop didn't see X6 coming, but you never see coursers coming, do you. You get close, you get cocky, and then you find yourself pinned up against a tree with a gun to your head, and it's goodbye world, it was nice knowin' ya. Before she can get herself real fuckin' executed, however, Sole intervenes. For a wild second Bishop thinks it's the package Patriot sent her to pick up until Sole orders X6 to set Bishop down and X6 _listens._ As she's doing that, the moon comes out from the clouds and Bishop recognizes the face from the portrait in the boardroom: Commander Bennett, Father's mother. The founder of the Collective, supposedly dead for the last thirty years but apparently alive and kicking and with fucking _X6-88_ under her command. _Oh, this is bad._

While Bishop's still reeling from this knowledge, X6 is busy explaining that she's a runaway. Unit designation B3-47, aka Barbara Winchester, aka Bobby Lin, aka Babs McGee: better known as Agent Bishop of the Railroad. Okay, cool, so what's the Railroad, and what's Bishop - Bishop? - Bishop running away _from_ , exactly? They argue/explain, talking over each other, until Sole cuts them short: no, yeah, I got that part. But what was her crime? She's a runaway, ma'am. And that's… not allowed, Sole says, because…? Because synths are the property of the Collective? Oh, jesus, she says, and steps away, her skin chalk-white in the moonlight. Ma'am? X6 says, concerned, and Sole orders him to release Bishop in a dead-sounding voice. When X6 confusedly complies, she gestures: go on, get the fuck out of here. Go spy on someone else, for fuck's sake, didn't you hear me? And then she turns and walks away, leaving Bishop and X6 staring at each other in mutual confusion.

###### 

_Slaves,_ Sole's thinking. Jesus Christ, they took Nate's synths and made them into slaves. It's just as well Nate's dead because otherwise this would kill him all over again. She goes and sits on the bridge, feet dangling down and staring at the river, and wonders if she shouldn't have gone with Plan A back when she got the diagnosis, a long walk and a short barrel. At least then she wouldn't have to wake up into a world in which the synths her husband died to free are treated like _things_. She always knew she should have died down there instead of Nate, this is her punishment for letting him send her ahead with Shaun. He wouldn't have raised their son into someone who could let this happen. She should have knocked his dumb ass out and shoved him in the transport so she could die down there with Conrad, the world would have been better off-

Ma'am, X6 says, and she only realizes she's shaking when she feels his coat settle around her shoulders. You're freezing. It's cold out here, she lies, even though she can tell it's a balmy summer evening, and then admits that it's her illness, it fucks her temperature regulation. It's funny 'cause she used to run hot, her first time out of cryo. He doesn't say anything and she prickles up: sorry for not being whatever the fuck it is you wanted me to be, but- Ma'am, he tells her, gentle and calm, I don't want anything except to serve. Yeah, that's kinda the fucking problem, he gets that, right?

But he doesn't get angry back like she half-expects, just tilts up his chin to an angle that reads like arrogance and says maybe that's not good enough for _lesser_ synths, but he's a _courser,_ and it's his _honor_ to serve. Even if there's a good chance she's an enemy of the Collective? Because whatever they've got going on up there, they're not going to want her around, that's for fucking sure. She _is_ the Collective, he says, quietly and with absolute belief, her and Father both. And Father instructed _him_ to protect her, Father trusted _him_ to take care of her, and he won't fail in his duty.

Starting now, he says, and offers her a hand up. She needs to eat, and sleep, and get warm. She can tell him their next step after that.

###### 

X6 hears Bishop coming up the path about an hour later. The commander's half-asleep by the fire, still wrapped in his coat, and it gives him a warm rush of satisfaction to see it, a tangible symbol of care properly provided. He leaves Sole dozing and goes to meet Bishop on silent footsteps, rifle out. She meets the pointed gun with a raised chin and lifts the pack she's carrying: didn't anyone ever tell you not to shoot the messenger? I've got a delivery for her highness, if she doesn't want it she can tell me to fuck off herself.

Sole calls for him to let her pass - better hearing than human too, he'll have to remember that - and Bishop sidles into the camp and hands over the pack, says it's for her. And how do you figure that, kid? Well, I was sent here to… Bishop eyes X6 sidelong, who doesn't even pretend not to be listening to every word, and says that there's a mole in the Collective. He, or she, or they, get the synths out, and they send messages to the Railroad to find them. When Bishop got to the pickup point, there was this pack waiting, and since there's no synth here for pickup, it's probably for her.

Sole's unpacking as she explains, a leather coat, her bed roll, more rations, but it's when she gets to the bottom that she makes a reverent noise and pulls out a gun belt with a revolver in the holster. She pulls it, spins it around her fingers, and rubs her thumbs over initials carved on the grip. I left this with Shaun, she says - not threatening, exactly, but seeming like she might be thinking about it. How'd your mole get ahold of it? I don't know, Bishop says, and X6 makes a disbelieving noise. I _don't,_ but I want to find out. If, uh, if you'll have me.

You have _got_ to be kidding, says X6, appalled, but Sole's considering it. Curiosity, Agent Bishop? Self-preservation, Commander. Anything that has Father and our inside man working on the same goal is big, bad news for the Railroad, and probably every synth in the Collective. It's my _job_ to get to the bottom of that, and the fastest way to do that is with you. Well, why the hell not? Sole says, over X6's shocked _ma'am,_ and then grins that shark grin X6 recognizes from the photo on Father's desk and says, and if we're going to be travelling together, Agent Bishop, you might as well call me Sole.

###### 

The next morning Sole's up before Bishop, dressed and wearing a dove-gray leather duster over Collective blacks, braiding her hair into two Annie Oakley plaits by the fire. She winks, tosses Bishop a ration pack, and strides off to tell X6 they're ready to move, leaving Bishop feeling vaguely poleaxed. It's a little more in line with how she'd pictured the Commander Bennett of the stories: even in sanitized Collective history she strode large across otherwise meek accounts of scientific progress and discovery, fighting mirelurks and hunting raiders. But it's also a long way away from the quiet, contained woman Bishop met last night, and she's not sure which one she should treat as real.

Then Bishop jerks out of her reverie as she belatedly realizes she heard Sole say something about 'Lexington,' and scrambles after her for an explanation.

Apparently the 'Oracle' in Shaun's message refers to an old underground DIA lab Sole found back in her old Institute days. Shaun used it for his senior thesis research - yes, scientists used to leave the fucking park, Bishop, stop goggling at me - on predictive machine analysis, which he always called Project Oracle as a joke. Whatever Shaun wants her to find, it'll be down there. Well, there's one problem with that, Bishop says: it's not Lexington anymore, and hasn't been for like twenty years. It's called Makerstown now, and it's raider territory.

Back in the day it was settled by the gearheads kicked out of Transit Town after the park closed its gates. (Sole scowls, but says nothing.) They retooled the old Corvega factory, started making robots and motorcycles and all sorts of shit, and they started out independent but a raider gang moved in and took over about twelve years back. Since then it's been a rotating cast of tough guys - until a year ago, when a man named Colter showed up with three big gangs under his banner, and he's stayed in control ever since. It's like he knows what's going to happen before it does. A few months back one of the gangs tried for a coup, but Colter was waiting, killed them all, and now it's just the Operators and Pack. Nobody knows how he did it - although knowing there's supposedly a friggin' 'Oracle' down there, Bishop's got a pretty good idea.

Is that going to be a problem? X6 asks, watching Sole's face, but Sole only shrugs and takes a swig off her flask - the third time in an hour, Bishop can't help but note. A complication, maybe. Only one way to find out.

###### 

They camp for the night at Starlite, since Sole’s not in any shape to make it a straight shot and they want to be at their best when they hit the gates. Back in the day she could have marched to Lexington and back in a day with time to spare and she bets X6 could too, but he deliberately slows the pace to match hers without letting on to Bishop that she's the weak link. It's not that she doesn't trust Bishop - okay, it's a little that she doesn't trust Bishop - but mostly that it's her business, dying. She doesn't want anyone involved, but if it's got to be someone, at least it's quiet, clever X6, the kind of soldier she'd always wanted when she first started the courser program. Shaun didn't fuck that up, at least. X6 is everything she dreamed and more.

Starlite is a surprise to Sole, who remembers when it was an empty, rad-strewn parking lot: it's turned into a sort of tent city for traders and scavs that don't feel safe spending the night in Makersville. There's a little bar/eatery out of the old concession shop, and a few semi-permanent merchant stalls huddled around it. Sole spots a sweet-looking shotgun and makes a beeline for the weapons stall, X6 and Bishop trailing after her. Unused to the price changes, she thoughtlessly offers way too high, and while the merchant splutters, worried it's a trap, Bishop jumps in to rescue her, pretending she's an idiot up from one of the outer settlements, you know how they breed 'em stupid out there.

Amused, Sole lets her handle getting them food and a patch - refusing the tent rental from the aggressive hawker, since it's a beautiful clear summer night - and then as the other two are settling in to eat, Sole gets up to get water, shaking her head at X6 when he makes to follow. She refills their skins off the pump - the merchant eyes her for a moment, and then visibly decides not to try and scalp her on the fee - and then ducks behind a stall to mix her meds in the flask. Those are her last few pills; she'll just have to hope that she can get more in the city tomorrow. If not, she might have to have that conversation with Bishop after all.

X6 eyes her when she comes back, his gaze flicking to the flask and back, and she shakes her head. He tips his shoulder in a shrug, and Sole gives his shoulder a squeeze of thanks as she settles down cross-legged next to him, and grins at Bishop. Now, where were we?

###### 

After dinner is when Bishop settles in for some _proper_ intelligence gathering. Not that the commander has been reticent so far: she kept them both entertained on the road today, a fast-talking charmer with several decades of tall tales under her belt. But Bishop knows that kind of patter because she uses it all the time herself, seemingly open while revealing absolutely nothing of note. Bishop got more about Sole's personal life from the Collective history imprint than she did from eight hours of conversation, and depending on how things go in Makersville, this might be the only chance she gets to tip the scales. 

(And she _needs_ to know, because a power player like Sole only comes along once in a generation, if that. She might be the lever they need to move the world or she might send them to hell in a handbasket, and Bishop damn well needs to make sure it's the former and not the latter.)

She starts by asking about Sole's duster, which has been clearly and quietly driving X6 crazy all day, what with the 'clear deficiencies of non-Collective-issued gear' or what the fuck ever. Sole laughs and spins a tale about a three-day cat-and-mouse with an albino deathclaw just off the Glowing Sea, which she skinned herself as a trophy when she was done. Even X6 seems enthralled by the tale, though he does his best to pretend not to be listening: Bishop catches him leaning forward at certain points, and at one particularly tense moment she's pretty sure he actually holds his breath.

Bishop's got an ulterior motive, though, and smoothly segues into asking about the revolver. Sole clearly didn't expect that and pauses, something icy and dangerous closing down on her face. Beside her X6 reacts, straightening up from the slouch he'd been sliding into for the last half-hour, and Bishop suddenly gets the feeling that she's sharing a campfire with a pair of deathclaws, studying her like they're trying to decide if she's going to be worth the effort to chase. Bishop ignores the shiver that wants to wrack down her spine and presses forward, just a little: it's just that I saw the initials there, but if it's a sensitive subject… No, it's fine, Sole decides, after an unnerving moment, and then the deathclaw is gone, and Bishop is once more sitting across from a funny, charming woman, who is even now unholstering the revolver and passing it over to Bishop.

X6 looks like he wants to protest, _strenuously,_ but whether that's because he doesn't believe in arming synths or because he doesn't want Bishop to get something first, Bishop doesn't know and doesn't care. "C.K.," she reads out, carefully not running her finger across the etching as she's seen Sole do when she's thinking, because she's not looking to get her knuckles broken, thanks. That's not your husband, right? X6's lip curls up in a visible sneer - as if Bishop might have somehow _forgotten_ the revered Dr. Duvall, Father's Father who built the synths - but Sole just chuffs a laugh. No, not Nate. Conrad. Conrad Kellogg. Bishop doesn't have to feign confusion, but Sole doesn't seem offended: Nah, no reason for you to know. He was a nobody, a mercenary, a hired killer. Coldest bastard she ever met - and her best friend.

What happened, Bishop asks, and Sole shrugs. What do you think? He died. Burned up in the Institute-That-Was, alongside Nate. Bishop nods: everyone in the Collective knows that story, how he perished in the reactor overload, sending his wife and son ahead with the refugees to Nuka-World. Kellogg wasn't in it. Kellogg didn't make for a good story, Sole says with a lopsided shrug. I remember, and that's enough.

X6 moves uncertainly, his hand rising like he wants to reach out - but Sole shifts before his hand can land, and he curls it quickly, shamefully, back to his side. Bishop pretends not to notice but tucks it away in her back pocket for later ammunition as she hands Sole's revolver back. Sole holsters it and then looks up with a distinct _and that's enough about me_ look in her eyes as she grins brightly at Bishop: what about you, kid, there a Mister Bishop out there?

Bishop loves when people just _hand_ her openings like that, and gives herself a moment to appear uncomfortable before admitting that there used to be. Back when she first got out of the Collective. She fell in love with a wandering merc, settled down to farm and play house. He was a redhead, too, not as vivid as Sole's but with the brightest blue eyes you've ever seen. They were happy for a while. What happened? There was this gang, anti-synth fuckers that called themselves the Deathclaws, somehow figured out she was a synth and came after her. She got away, he didn't, she cut a bloody swathe avenging his death, and that's how the Railroad found her. Shit, Sole says, sorry I asked, and Bishop tips her shoulder in a shrug. That's the Commonwealth for you. Dunno what it was like in your day, but you can't get very far if you can't look out for yourself.

###### 

Bishop turns in not long after her _oh-so-enlightening_ tale, which was clearly calculated to induce some effect in the commander, though X6 can't for the life of him figure out what. To prove some point about the supposed benefits of freedom? It seems the opposite to him, a rousing example of why the desire for life outside the Collective is little more than a logic error in need of correction. Coursers are specially trained and conditioned to experience conditions in the Commonwealth, and even he spends most of his time outside the walls wanting to go _back_.

He sneaks a look over at the commander, who shows no signs of following Bishop's example, leaning back on her hands to study the sky. Most of the time, yes. But this mission, this charge… He knows he's lucky to be here, wherever her path might lead.

After a while Sole silently climbs to her feet, jerking her head toward the projection screen as if to tell him where she'll be. He ignores the implied instruction to remain with Bishop and gets up to follow. She gives him a faintly amused glance but doesn't send him back, merely slows her stride to allow him to catch up and leads him around the back and up the stairs to the top of the screen. They settle in together at the railing, still without exchanging a word, and when she shivers he instinctively moves closer. He only meant to take off his coat and wrap her up against the breeze, but she misinterprets his gesture and leans in against him. His heart nearly stops at her slight weight against his side, but it feels so _good_ to be close to her, to be so directly of use. He's not going to be the one to tell her to stop.

After a long silence - he's not the best judge, but it _seems_ comfortable - she finally draws in a breath to speak. He tenses up, waiting for her to tell him to move, but she only says, So, coursers, you're the Collective's soldiers? He relaxes, back on firmer ground even if she's still leaning on him, and nods. Yes, ma'am, we form the bulk of the enforcement protocol, though there are some Gen 2's that provide additional security. And you're under… SRB, right? That's still around? Yes, coursers are the provenance of SRB. Our Director is Dr. Zimmer. Oh, I remember him, Sole says, he's a Director now? Yes, he was chosen as your replacement after your, ah, retirement. And Shaun, what's he do? He mostly worked with Advanced Systems back then, but he did some really good work for Robotics in his teens, so… Father is our Executive Director, he oversees the Board. Oh, she says, and deflates a little. She drums her fingers on the railing. I can see him being good at that, I guess. He always was a smooth talker. Got that from his dad. X6 gives her a faintly disbelieving look - from his limited experience, she seems to be a pretty fucking smooth talker herself - but she's not looking at him. Does he like it, do you know? Is he happy?

X6 never considered that question before, of Father's happiness, and he finds he doesn't know the answer. He's… busy. He's greatly respected by his peers. Peers, not friends? X6 can't say. That's obviously not what she wanted to hear, so he offers, He still does a fair amount of research, scrambling for something to take that look off her face. He often loses track of time when he's working, and he's… looser, less formal in his lab. He smiles more. To everyone, really, but especially to his lab assistant Curie, a synth of unusual background- Oh, I remember Curie, they're still together? That's nice. X6 must have finally said something right, because Sole's looking off into the night sky with a smile that makes him feel like he's won something important. That's really nice, actually, she repeats. I hope I can see them again. You will, he says, his throat aching, ma'am, I'm certain you will. She says nothing, but she lays her head on his shoulder, and they stand together in silence.

###### 

They roll into Makerstown around noon the next day, Bishop hanging back and letting Sole take the lead since there's still an _eensy_ chance that some of the old-timers might recognize her from missions past. They wind around the marketplace for a bit, taking in the sights, but Bishop soon realizes that Sole is getting progressively grimmer the further they get. It's not until she catches Sole looking a little too long at a bomb collar that she realizes she'd never warned Sole about the slaves. It's been a fact of life so long that it honestly never even occurred to her that Sole might not _know_.

Never one to pass up a useful teaching moment, however, Bishop sidles up next to her, puts a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. I know, right? Synths used to end up here all the time, until Colter took over. He makes sure any synths get turfed out of the gates, says it's to avoid Collective attention. Behind them, X6 snorts audibly, and she rounds on him, more than happy to drive a wedge between him and the commander after their intimate moonlit stroll the night before. What, you got something to say, soldier? Only that it's no surprise they end up in places like this, running away from the Collective with no idea of the dangers outside the walls. Better the collar you can see than the one everyone pretends doesn't exist, Bishop fires back, enjoying the chance to bring the fight back to her level. I'd take a raider over a mind-wipe every day. At least at the end I'd still be-

Would you two _knock it off,_ Sole growls, and both Bishop and X6 shut their mouths with a snap, because Sole sounds _actually angry._ Avoid Collective attention, she says, standing in the middle of the marketplace and glaring at them. _Avoid it,_ like if there's no synths the Collective just allows this to happen? Bishop sneaks a quick glance at X6, wondering if he knows what she's talking about, but X6 looks just as baffled as she feels. What the fuck, Sole says, almost blankly. So what's the SRB even _for,_ if not to clean up problems like this before they can happen? What's the goddamn point of you? X6 looks absolutely stunned at this unexpected attack, opens his mouth and then closes it again, and Bishop never thought she'd say this about a courser, but there's maybe just a _little_ flicker of pity for him. She wouldn't be feeling too great if her idol turned on _her_ like that, either.

You know what, never mind, Sole says, and tosses a bag of caps to Bishop. You, ask around, and you, guard her. What about you, ma'am? X6 says, and she snaps, _working,_ before shouldering her shotgun and stomping off. Bishop watches him stare after her, her red hair bobbing away in the crowd, and has the wild urge to reassure him until he turns back with a growl to get moving.

###### 

X6 doesn't get any less sulky over the next hour or so, either, but Bishop makes a determined effort to tune it out. She's got enough to deal with as it is, anyway. Gathering information is kind of what she _does,_ but she's usually got, y'know, an actual target to work with. 'Ask around' is a little vague for her tastes. She doesn't even know what they're looking _for_ , and X6's looming presence is _seriously_ off-putting to the nervous merchants.

It's not long before Bishop finds herself at least a little grateful for his presence, though, because some dipshit Pack goon starts harassing her in the marketplace. She could've handled it, okay, she can take care of herself, but the guy is very large and it's maybe a _little_ nice to let herself melt away behind X6's even larger bulk and let him work out his aggression the old-fashioned way. No one could be idiot enough to get aggro with someone who looks like X6, so she's figuring they'll exchange a few threats and then the goon will slink off with his tail between his legs. And if it'd been any other raider, sure, but the Pack have a _thing_ about challenges, and the goon promptly starts trying to pick a fight with X6 instead. Bishop is just starting to wonder if maybe _she_ should step in and try to cool things down when X6 visibly reaches the end of his short tether, reaches out, and breaks the man's neck with one clean twist.

The resulting scramble nearly turns into a full-scale shootout before Mason arrives to shout everyone down. Who the fuck do you think you are? he demands, and Bishop's frantically trying to figure out how she can talk them out of this one when Sole's amused voice rings out from the left: he's one of mine. X6's shoulders snap courser-straight, and Sole nods to him, sauntering up with her hands in her pockets. What seems to be the problem, Mister… That's _Alpha_ to the likes of you, Mason growls, and the problem is your man just fuckin' _killed_ one of mine, that's the fucking problem. You think you're too good for the rules, is that it?

Sole raises an eyebrow, and Bishop remembers her roiling temper earlier and groans inwardly in anticipation, but before Sole can answer another voice cuts in: Ah, put a sock in it, Mason. They all look over to find a man at the nearby noodle stand, a plate over his eye and an amused expression on his voice. Seems to me your dipshit picked a fight he couldn't win, the new guy continues, his drawl thicker than molasses, and he got what's coming to him. Can't blame a guy for defending himself. It's a somewhat… charitable interpretation of events, Bishop thinks doubtfully, but even weirder than that is how Mason is actually _listening._ Who the fuck could back down one of the top dogs in the town?

You saying you saw it happen? Yeah, One Eye says. Just like I said. Better to let it go, doncha think? Fine, Mason snaps, but I'm fucking _watching_ you, and he gestures angrily at both Sole and X6 before he stalks off. Well, that was friendly, Sole says, after a minute. Ma'am, X6 says, his voice entirely toneless, and Sole shakes her head at him: not now. Appreciate you sticking your oar in, she tells One Eye, I owe you a drink or three. Well, I never say no to a free drink, and he holds out his hand - _just_ to Sole, Bishop notes; X6 and Bishop might as well not even exist. Porter Gage. Sole, Sole says, taking it. You new in town? That obvious, huh? A little, Gage grins, but I promise I won't hold it against ya.

Bishop checks to see how Sole's taking this bit of flirting, but she mostly just looks amused. Listen, Gage continues, I gotta take care of some business, but if you're serious about that drink, there's a bar down the end of the way, cheap and quiet. If I happen to run into you there in an hour or two, wouldn't break my heart. See what I can do, cowboy, Sole drawls back, and waits until Gage tips her a smile and strolls off before she turns back to X6 and Bishop. C'mon, kids, I think that's enough splitting up for now, huh? X6 goes even more stone-faced, but Bishop scrambles happily after Sole when she turns away. Seems like they've been forgiven for now, and _just_ as things are getting interesting.

###### 

Sole returns to Mackenzie Bridgerton's shop, all smiles and apologies for the unexpected interruption. They were having quite the interesting conversation, up until the commotion broke out. Sole wasn't expecting it, just wanted to use the unexpected bit of privacy to buy some more fucking meds, but she must not have been doing too good a job keeping her gaze off Mackenzie's collar, becuase Mackenzie seemed to realize she had a sympathetic ear. They didn't say anything too untoward, nothing that could get them in trouble even if they'd been overheard, but Sole thought they understood each other pretty well.

No apologies needed, Mackenzie's saying now, hazarding a quick glance towards X6 and Bishop, it's a pleasure to see anyone standing up to Mason. But, uh, listen. You should know - that guy you were talking to? Gage? Yeah, what about him? It's not common knowledge, but… that's Colter's left-hand man. The way I heard it, he's the one that pulled the gangs together in the first place. All Colter's intel, the stuff that keeps him one jump ahead of the gangs? Rumor is it comes from Gage. _Is_ it now, Sole says, already spinning through the possibilities, that's mighty interesting. She already figured he was a power player here in Makersville, but if he's playing with a stacked deck, that makes him doubly interesting. Well, good thing she's already meeting him for a drink, isn't it?

###### 

They get to the bar early, Bishop heading up to the bar to get them a round and leaves Sole to find a seat. She finds a booth along the far wall, puts her back to the wall and gestures X6 to slide in next to her. He complies, holding himself stiffly upright, hands folded on the table in front of him, and Sole uses his shoulder to hide the motion of shaking out a pill from the rest of the room and chases it down with a swallow from her flask. She tucks her meds away with a shaking hand and slumps down in the booth, breathing heavily. It took a lot out of her, fronting calm in front of all those fucking raiders and merchants and whatever the fuck Gage was gonna turn out to be. She shouldn't have pushed it like that. She _knows_ better, she's been here before. She needs to be more careful.

X6 bends his head towards her, his stiffness forgotten in his concern. Are you alright, ma'am? Yeah, I'll be fine, just went a little close to the line. Don't worry, I made sure to stock up. Are you sure you can trust this… doctor's formulation, X6 says, disdain dripping from every syllable, and she laughs. Yeah, don't worry, it's not complicated. It's not my first time at the rodeo, you know. I was sick for a long time before I went back on the ice, I took all kinds of shit from wasteland docs. I may not be an egghead but I know what I put in my body. If you're sure, X6 murmurs, and then seems to remember their spat and the awkwardness comes lurching back. Well, shit.

Look, Sole sighs, just as X6 says, ma'am, and they both stop. X6 has that stony look on his face again so Sole just jumps in: look, I owe you an apology. Of course not, ma'am, he says, but she waves it away. No, that was way out of line earlier, I felt like shit and I took it out on you and that's not fair. It's not- What the Collective does, that's not on you, and I of all people should know better. So I'm sorry. You don't need to apologize to me, ma'am, X6 says, with a soft shocked cant to his mouth like he's never gotten one before, but when she makes a disagreeable noise the corner of his mouth ticks up fractionally and he says, But it's appreciated nonetheless. Better, she tells him, and bumps her shoulder against his. Hey. We good? Of course, ma'am, he says, softly enough that she actually believes it. I'm at your disposal.

At the bar, Bishop pantomimes something that might indicate that the drinks are taking a bit longer than expected or might mean that she likes to do water aerobics, it's hard to tell. Sole gives her a thumbs up and lets herself relax back into the booth, enjoying the warm glow of body heat radiating out from X6 next to her. X6 is the one to speak first, surprisingly enough, asks her what the SRB was like in her day. She studies the side of his face for a moment, but he seems earnest, as much as X6 ever seems like anything, so she shrugs and starts talking. It was just her and Kellogg, back in the day; the Institute was underground, so they didn't need a lot of surface enforcement. It was different once they were in the parks, suddenly they couldn't just teleport everywhere and they had to worry about supply lines and shit. For a while it was just her and a bunch of mercs, some who didn't even know they were working on the Collective's dime. Then the Collective started expanding, Transit Town started turning into a trade hub, and suddenly they needed _cops,_ like she didn't have enough to worry about… One thing just kinda turned into another, honestly. Eventually she had to throw together some kind of organization just to keep on top of the goddamn paperwork.

It's a funny story, actually, she adds, smiling a little now. Shaun was the one who named it the Strategic Resources Bureau. He always had a funny sense of humor, had a thing for those weird old government euphemisms, and… What? she says, noticing X6's returning stiffness, what'd I say? Nothing, it's only… We were always told it stood for 'Synth Retention Bureau.' Oh, she says quietly, and looks down at her hands. X6 is obviously braced for her to lose her temper again, but she doesn't think she has any anger left. She's mostly just sad. _Shaun,_ she thinks. _Oh, my baby boy, how could you let it come to this?_

I think I understand a little better about why coursers are designed the way we are, X6 says, when she doesn't say anything. She looks up at him, his carefully mild tone of voice and the deliberately relaxed cant of his shoulders, and tilts her head: yeah, how so? Coursers were designed to serve as the primary enforcement arm of the Collective, both inside and out of the park. I always wondered why we were given such broad-spectrum training, when the Collective generally prefers a more specialized approach to its personnel. But I understand, now. They were trying to recreate you. _Oh,_ she says, barely more than a breath: staring at him now, the gentle uptick of his soft mouth. I've always been proud to be a courser, he tells her quietly. But now I understand that it's an honor.

She's not sure how long it would have taken for her to figure out what to say to that, but she's never gonna find out because a shadow falls over her before she gets the chance. She looks up to see Bishop standing there with an armload of drinks, and Porter Gage at her elbow, pint of beer in his hand and an amused look on his face. Look who I found! Bishop chirps, and slides into the booth opposite them. Your girl here already took care of round one, hope you don't mind, Gage says, and Sole matches his lazy smirk with one of her own, forcing her head back into the game. 'Course not, she says. Take a seat, cowboy, and we'll see how it goes for round two.

###### 

Squashed into a booth with six feet of armed and armored raider isn't Bishop's idea of a good time, but any desire to bitch is dwarfed under the knowledge that if Sole had tried to put X6 in her place it probably would have ended in straight-up murder. The inevitable fight for elbow room, for one - neither man is what you could comfortably call 'slender' - but also because X6 takes to Sole and Gage's carefully probing flirtation about as well as a cat takes to a bath. He gets progressively grimmer as the afternoon wears on, until Bishop wants to pull him aside and remind him that this is the _game,_ okay, this is what you _do_ when you're trying to get information, it doesn't mean it's real. Gage doesn't seem to mean it any more than Sole does, honestly, not according to Bishop's read on the situation. She knows a snake when it's jammed in next to her for hours, and if the guy's not cold-blooded right down to the fucking bone she'll eat her boots. If Bridgerton was right and he's Colter's information guy, then what he's doing here is his _job,_ as much as it's Bishop's. Any new player in town is worthy of interest, and Bishop would bet good caps that Gage pegged X6 as a courser. That makes the woman holding his leash automatically someone worth getting to know.

Nobody bothered to explain all that to X6, though, obviously. Probably too busy making up from that little spat earlier: things had looked pretty intense there for a minute, enough that Bishop had almost wanted to whack Gage over the head when he'd strolled in right as things were getting good. She couldn't hear them from all the way across the bar, of course, but she wasn't half-bad at reading lips, and she'd been able to catch about one word in three. Enough to be _really_ interested in the outcome of that conversation. No one's ever flipped a courser, not that Bishop's ever heard about, and X6 was Father's _personal_ courser, their best and brightest and most loyal. But if Sole doesn't have him damn near eating out of her hand, Bishop would eat her boots. (Again.) Harder to tell if the commander's just running a con or getting caught in her own net, but either way, it seems to be working like gangbusters on X6.

For example, just now, one of X6's threatening shifts got a little too intentional, and Sole put a hand on his leg under the table to hold him still. X6 relaxed like a frigging switch being flipped, which was interesting enough by itself, but then Sole _left_ her hand there, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Bishop's pretty sure she caught Gage eyeing the angle of her arm with a speculative glint, but if so the bastard's smart enough not to say anything, just reels back the flirting a tad in response.

It's only about half an hour later that Gage winds the conversation down to a close. He catches Sole eyeing the sunset through the window and makes a show of noticing the same thing, offers them a place to stay. All three a' ya, of course, but Sole smiling refuses, says they're just passing through. Well, if you change your mind, just ask around, I'm not hard to find, he tells her, and they shake hands before he heads off whistling.

Oh yeah, Sole says, when he's gone. He's got our number. She doesn't look too worried about it, so Bishop obligingly feeds her the next line: that going to be a problem, Boss? Sole grins at her, her hand still on X6's knee, and isn't _that_ interesting? Bishop, darlin', she says, her usual clipped accent loose and softened in automatic mimic of Gage's drawl, that depends on whether or not he decides to get in our way.

###### 

Sole leads them out of town once the sun's well and truly set, consulting the map on her Pip-boy and threading their way through the thick trees to the back tunnel entrance. X6-88 has no problem seeing in the dark and Sole clearly doesn't either, which is his excuse for why X6 - genuinely, whatever Bishop might claim - forgets that she doesn't have the same enhancements. After she reminds him, however, the next few branches he snaps back into her face are definitely on purpose.

Inside the facility X6 steps forward to take point automatically, only pausing to look to Sole for permission afterwards. She raises an eyebrow, gestures for him to get to it, and he very carefully doesn't smile as he starts cutting his way through the automated defenses. He'd never admit it, but he's showing off a bit. (Bishop's muttered imprecations on the subject he loftily ignores.) And Sole's pleased, approving noises, the way she claps him on the shoulder as she passes through a doorway? That's all the reward he needs.

They soon make their way into the main part of the facility… only to find Gage already there waiting for them, accompanied by a bunch of robots. Do I even gotta say it? he asks, smirking, and Sole sighs and disarms. X6 hesitates to follow suit: so what if there's an assaultron? With the commander at his side, he'd take those odds any day. But she signals for him to stand down so he reluctantly complies.

With them disarmed, Gage feels confident enough to monologue: apparently he found PAM the first week after the takeover, and he's been using her to keep Colter ahead of the gangs on his heels. He's _always_ one step ahead, one way or another, and she's not the first smooth-talking merc with an eye on his secrets. It's too bad, 'cause he likes her, but- any last words? X6's hands tighten into fists, leaning slightly forward on the balls of his toes, his eyes on the assaultron, just waiting for the commander's signal - but she doesn't give it. Instead, she says "Initiate system override," and while Gage is spluttering, finishes with her authorization code. The lights come up to full in the room, the robots all stand down, and Gage says _shit_ , sighs just like Sole had, and lowers his weapon.

###### 

Bishop helps Sole disarm the robots while X6 guards Gage. He offers to kill Gage with barely-disguised eagerness - either he really wants to show off or _really_ hated having to sit through their flirtation earlier - but Sole waves him down. They're not here for Gage. They're here for PAM, who comes online when Sole crouches down in front of her. Administrator Alpha recognized, she says. Welcome back, Commander Bennett. In X6's grip, Gage makes a short, harsh, disbelieving sort of noise, so he at least knows the name, but Sole only smiles and strokes her fingers down PAM's chassis. It's good to be back, PAM. Do you have a message for me? Yes, PAM says. From Administrator Beta. She needs to find the Vox Prima. Great, Sole says. Fucking perfect. Of course I do. That's what this week really needs. Then she tells PAM it's not safe for her here anymore, but the back tunnel is cleared. Does she remember the fallback plan? Good girl. She'll meet her there soon, just as soon as she can, and they'll go and find Shaun together.

After PAM clears off, X6 nods to Gage. What about him? What about him, Sole muses. She doesn't have much of what you'd call a moral code, but she takes a personal line against slavery. Gage hurries to point out that he's not looking for a quarrel with the Collective, that's why he turns synths out, they've never given a fuck about Makersville otherwise. Yeah, says Sole, that's the goddamn problem. This is the real reason Shaun sent her here, when he could've given her the intel directly: he needed her to see. Well, she's seeing pretty goddamn clear, isn't she? And if this is going to be her last field trip through the Commonwealth, she's not going to leave this goddamn _cancer_ festering in her wake. They're going to the factory - not this week, not tomorrow, _tonight,_ and they're going to wipe those fuckers off the face of the planet.

(Oh, thinks Bishop. Oh, I can't _wait_ to introduce her to Deacon.)

She tells Gage that she owes him for stepping in with Mason earlier, so she's not going to shoot him, but they can't have him interfering: she's going to lock him in the vault until they're done. What, and leave him to starve to death when they got themselves killed on this fool's errand? Nah, he doesn't think so. He'd rather the bullet, thanks, at least it's a quick death. Sole heaves a sigh of the extremely put-upon, but gestures for him to hold out his hands and snaps on a pair of handcuffs. (Do I want to know why she's carrying those? Bishop says in an aside to X6, who glares at her.) You got the codes for the central power system? Yeah, 'course. Cool, you're with us. Do your job right and tomorrow we go our separate ways. Deal? X6 objects to this _strenuously,_ but Gage grins maliciously at him and says _deal_.

###### 

They go in through the sewer pipe, with Gage grumbling about how he _told_ Colter to block the damn thing up, but did anyone listen? Noooo. Fucker said no one would find it down here. Didn't count on a fossil who used to explore these ruins before he was even born, did he? By the way, unblocked doesn't mean unguarded. _Good_ , Sole says savagely. I'm in the mood for some _trouble._

It's the first time she's actually been in combat since she came out of the vault, and it's here that she's truly in her element. She can handle the sneaking, the politics, the lies, but _this_ is what she's for. X6 is at her shoulder every step of the way, roaming ahead and dropping back at a glance, reading her without so much as a word uttered, the most perfect partner she's ever had. At first she thinks maybe it's all her, adrenaline or whatever, except she can see it on his face too: the pleasure, the bewilderment, the same sense of utter _rightness_ , of finding something you never even thought to look for.

It makes them both incredibly reluctant to split up, but once they finish cleaning out the factory floor it's pretty much their only play. X6 heads up to go hunt down the Operators, and Sole takes the lead to escort the other two through Pack territory to the control room. Unfortunately, Mason's cannier than she gave him credit for, and they end up walking straight into an ambush. Bishop gets knocked down, Sole takes out most of the party and ends up grappling with Mason over his rifle, and she's inhumanly strong but he's a big bastard and that's not a fight she's looking likely to win.

###### 

On the other side of the room, Gage looks down at his cuffed hands, looks behind him at the open doorway, looks back to where Sole is fighting for her life. Then, cursing himself even as he does it, he scoops up her revolver and puts three rounds through Mason's temple. Sole shoves the body away with a kick and straightens, his rifle still in her hands, and eyes him with interest. Gage spins the revolver and offers it, butt-first, in his cuffed hands.

She takes it and holsters it, bending to scoop up her shotgun with her free hand, eyeing him like a cat with a mouse that just stood up and quoted Chaucer. So, changed our minds, did we? Whatever, he mutters, and huffs a sigh even as she takes out the key and unlocks the cuffs. Just gettin' soft in my old age, is all. Sole grins and tells him she's got at least a dozen years on him, whippersnapper, so he'd best respect his elders, and tosses him The Problem Solver. He examines the brightly painted stock with distaste and grabs Mason's spare ammo - luckily the fucker didn't bleed all over it - shoving it into his pockets as Bishop staggers to her feet, bleeding sluggishly from a cut above her eye. She swipes it away with her sleeve and considers Gage like she might still be hallucinating: are we arming the prisoners now? Change of plans, Sole says, and unbuckles her Pip-Boy, tossing it to Bishop. You two, get to the control room. What are you gonna do, Boss? Gage says, and realizes what he called her even as a Cheshire grin spreads over her face. I'm gonna find X6. You two just focus on turning off those lights: I do my best work in the dark.

###### 

She finds X6 by following the trail of bodies, and catches up with him just before the room where Colter's holed up with the rest of the raiders. She eyes the beauty of a sniper rifle slung over his back as he eyes the blood spatter on her tac vest, mutually sizing each other up. I see you got me a present, she says, nodding to the rifle, and X6 smiles at that, not even a tiny lip-twitch but a real smile. The lights cut out, and they take a moment to adjust, their enhanced eyes meeting in the murk of the red emergency lighting. He inclines his head toward the door: after you, ma'am. Oh, I think we can do it one better, she says, and they share a moment of silent and perfect accord before they line up shoulder-to-shoulder, kick in the doors, and start shooting.

###### 

The next morning, MacKenzie is opening her shop, sleepy and puzzled because no one came to wake the slaves. And then she sees four figures coming through the swirling morning mist: Sole and her misfit trio. Including Gage, stripped of his armor down to just the tank top, his arm around a bloody and limping Bishop. MacKenzie sets aside her questions in favor of getting Bishop onto her table and stitched up. When she straightens, wiping her hands, Sole's standing there with a collar control mechanism, and MacKenzie flinches but Sole only sets it gently to the lock at her throat and clicks it open. She almost doesn't believe it, stares as it falls to the ground and touches her bare throat wonderingly, and Sole just gives her shoulder a quick squeeze and presses the control rod into her hand, sliding away into the crowd MacKenzie didn't notice gathering.

Sole makes her way through, X6's imposing shoulders cutting her a path through the crowd, and then he cups his hands together and vaults her up onto the roof of the armor stall as easily as a bit of dandelion fluff. She cups her hands together and declares that Colter's dead, Mason and the Blacks along with him. Makersville is its own again. The cheer that goes up from the crowd is deafening, and MacKenzie looks around, almost unable to believe it, and sees Gage standing there watching Sole, looking like he wants to take her apart and find out how she works. Who IS she, MacKenzie asks, and Gage half-laughs: bitter, a little lost. Commander Bennett, apparently. Y'all just got your asses saved by a fucking ghost.

###### 

They take the day to rest and recover; Sole and X6 crash in the back room of the clinic to sleep like the dead while Bishop snoozes on the table with Gage waking her up every couple hours on MacKenzie's orders. Apparently he's steering clear of the townsfolk, in case they decide to get in a spot of righteous vengeance; at the moment nobody seems to remember that he was Colter's advisor and he's not in a hurry to remind them. It's no less than you deserve, Bishop says, and he shrugs. Deserve doesn't mean shit in the wastes. And she doesn't have too much of a high horse, does she - since when did anyone in the Railroad give a fuck about a human? Yeah, he's not stupid, he knows what she is. Took him a bit, but he remembers her face from missions past. It was his idea to let synths go, did she know that? Because he knew that nobody on either side gave a shit about the humans caught in the middle, and he was right. They ruled here because nobody cared enough to stop them: not the Collective, not the Railroad, not those useless Minutemen bastards with their tin stars. Far as he can tell, last bit of justice the 'wealth died out when Bennett did. And now she's back, and nobody seems to get the world's about to change. That poor fucker X6 - nodding to the back corner, where Sole's asleep on his shoulder - he's just in it for her, he doesn't give a fuck about anything else. And Bishop's there for, what, the mystery? The adventure? The fucking leverage? You don't fucking get it yet: you don't ride a storm. You get in, you get out of the way, or you fucking drown. Those are your only options.

###### 

Later that day, Sole's all the way up on the tower on Corvega's roof, smoking and watching the sun set. She doesn't hear X6's footsteps, but she feels his weight vibrate the catwalk, and doesn't startle when he comes up behind her. Bishop's looking for you, he says. Something about a celebration. Well, that should be interesting, she says dryly, and then falls silent again. X6 pauses, lets out a breath, and then puts a hand on her shoulder: is there something wrong, ma'am? That depends on you, she says, not turning around, just looking down at the city. It doesn't get any easier from here, you know. Whatever Shaun's cooking up back there, it's probably not exactly with the Directorate's approval, not where she's going. This is… treason, probably. She can't turn back now, but she wouldn't blame him if he went back to the Collective. This has to be his choice, does he understand? This goes beyond orders, beyond loyalty. She has to know that this is what he wants.

He's silent, and when she finally gathers her nerve enough to turn and look, she realizes with a shock that his shades are in his pocket. His eyes are lighter than she expected, a pale steely blue, and they're very steady on hers when he says, in a low intimate murmur: I'm at your disposal, ma'am. I suppose you are, she murmurs back, something like joy taking wing in her heart, and stubs out her cigarette before she deliberately winds her arm through his. C'mon, let's go see what kind of trouble Bishop's getting into.

###### 

That night they hole up in Colter's old office - no one has stepped forward to claim it yet, though there were murmurs about setting up some kind of election in the next few days - to share a hearty meal and a well-deserved bottle of whiskey. Well, Sole and Gage are; McKenzie forbade Bishop any intoxicants for at least two days, and X6 of course isn't partaking. But it seems like he's caught everyone's good mood anyway, shades still off and eyes half-lidded, sitting back against the wall with a loose lean that could almost qualify as a slouch. He doesn't even stiffen up when Gage's fingers brush against Sole's passing the bottle back and forth… although that might be because of the way Sole's sitting crosswise, her legs draped over his with a casual air of ownership. Oh yeah, that's gonna be ugly when it inevitably goes to shit, Bishop thinks, but it's hard to be too worried about the future right now, in the warm golden light of their lantern and the warmer glow of their impossible success.

It's Bishop who breaks their easy patter, asking where we're headed next. We? Sole teases, and Bishop gives her best offended look: please, I don't give up so easy, not even if you lead me into the Glowing Sea. Aw, your loyalty is touching. Damn right it is! But, just for the sake of curiosity… where _are_ we going? Diamond City, Sole says. Is that where this Vox Prima is? Gage asks, then holds up his hands when they all stare at him. What, like I don't got ears? Vox Prima isn't a what, Sole says, before the bickering can start back up. It's a who. It's bad dog latin for First Voice, which is what some synths used to call- DiMa, Bishop finishes breathlessly. You actually know DiMa? Sole looks like she bit into a lemon: Yeah, I used to.

Gage cuts in next: Yeah, and for those of who didn't grow up in a lab, who the fuck is DiMa? A prototype synth, Sole explains, before they made the jump to organics: the model for successful synthetic cognition. Went our separate ways when the old Institute fell, and it wasn't exactly parting in sweet sorrow. Haven't talked to the fucker in twenty - christ, make that almost fifty years now. No idea where he went, but there's a detective in Diamond City bound to have a clue. So that's where they're going next.

Well, _we_ are, anyway, she adds, looking at Gage. I promised we could go our separate ways when this is done, and by any measure it's pretty fucking done. Well, I heard this rumor, Gage drawls. Machine y'all used to have in the Collective. Spits out new caps like pages off a printing press. There was, Sole says, head tilted. Dunno if it's still there. Well, seems to me, you're fixing to work your way back around thataway once you get whatever it is you need from this DiMa. Smart money says you might find an extra gun pretty useful, especially since this one - thumb jerked at Bishop - can't shoot worth shit. Whaddaya say? Bishop glances at X6, but he doesn't speak up in protest; his eyes are still half-closed, Sole's thumb tracing a pattern on his knee. What the hell, Sole says, and grins. Welcome to the team, Porter.

###### 

The next morning, before they hit the road, Bishop corners Gage picking through the gear in Colter's stash: what happened to getting the fuck out of the way, huh? If you think you're going to lead her around like you did Colter… Gage looks up at her, already strapped into scuffed black riot plate with BPD stenciled over the heart. Didn't you listen to a damn word I said? You can't steer a woman like that. Only safe place in the storm is right in the middle, and if he's lucky, might find an opportunity or two in her wake. Like Bishop isn't planning the same? I'm watching you, she scowls, and he laughs and pulls out a coat, big dark leather that swirls around his heels when he puts it on. Likewise, darlin', he says. Sole sticks her head in, breaking up the tableau. Time to - nice coat, Gage - time to hit the road, guys. I want to make Diamond City the day after tomorrow.

###### 

Cut to two days later, inside the Dugout, with Sole and Bishop taking their laughing leave from Vadim at the bar and coming to join Gage and X6 at the corner table. Sole sets down a tray of drinks and slides into the booth next to X6, tucking herself in under his arm where it's stretched out along the back. She's been doing that since they left Corvega - touching him, that is, keeping close - and X6 is unsure what she means by it and pretty sure he doesn't care. If she's close then it means she's safe and pleased with his service; any enjoyment he gets from it is purely incidental unless she indicates otherwise. He sees Bishop eyeing him with concern, but raises an eyebrow and she shakes her head and looks away.

Welp, Bobrov didn't have anything useful, Sole says. What about you, Bishop, you get anything off that gate guard you were flirting with? Ah, nothing of value, Bishop says, looking caught out. X6 catches her gaze deliberately, smirking faintly, and she rolls her eyes and turns to elbow Gage. What about you, asshole, you get anything of use while you were spending our money? Whose money is that again? Gage snorts, and tosses Sole a bag of caps - minus his finder's fee, he didn't do all that haggling for free. Didn't get much from the locals, though, Boss. Looks like nobody knows much more about Valentine's disappearance than we already got off Ellie.

Well, it was probably a long shot, Sole admits with a shrug. On the upside, nobody's recognized them yet - a quick glance around for confirmation, getting nods - which means that if the Collective's after them, they haven't made it to DC yet. Wouldn't count on that luck holding, Gage drawls, and holds up the newspaper he had folded in his hand, with Piper's headline blaring over the top. Sole arches her brows at X6 and Bishop: X6 simply shrugs, Bishop says, I mean, probably? Great, Sole says, but there's a gleam in her eyes, something that sends a reciprocal thrill down X6's spine. Guess we'll just have to go look for ourselves, then, and the sooner the better.

Park Street Station, here we come.


	3. ...and some things that happened after that

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last previous was the rest of the outline of the original "Running with Scissors" story, but I came back to it earlier this year and realized I had all kinds of notes floating around about where I figured the story would go after that. So this is the outline for the sequel, which would have been called "Playing with Matches" because I think I'm very clever. Overall it has the same outline format as the last chapter, but there are some parts that are more sketched-out and less complete. One of the reasons for that is that it's a lot wider in scope; most of the heavy lifting for establishing the AU was done in the previous story, so this is where I was finally free to put all of the plot I had busily set up and then never actually completed. It's split up into three thematically-labeled parts (did I mention I think I'm very clever?) that takes Sole through meeting Nick, out to Far Harbor, and then back to the Collective to finish things once and for all. It's the free-all-the-synths revolutionary storyline I never really got to write anywhere else, and I'm pretty proud of it even if it's never going to be the fully-written novel it probably deserves to be.

###### 

**ACT ONE: IGNITION**

###### 

The story opens from Nick's point of view, trying to talk down Dino when his head suddenly explodes in a shower of gore. He shouts through the door, but it's a moment before he hears footsteps on the grate on the other side. The blood splatter means he can't see through the porthole, but whoever's on the other side shouts back to give 'em a minute, just getting the password now. Something about that voice is painfully familiar, though he has the sense that he hasn't heard it in years. He strains his ears, trying to figure it out… and the door swings open, and someone's in the doorway, and he knows that face. Feels his old ticker take a leap in his chest at the sight of her, but he can't for the life of him remember her name. He knows exactly who she is, but there's only one of his black spots where her name should be. Panic scrabbles at him-

-and then she drawls, My my, how times _haven't_ changed, and it's Sole. Of course. How could he ever forget his old pal Sole?

He's got a whole bunch of questions, starting with how come she's back after thirty - thirty? - twenty-nine years and hasn't aged a day, _again,_ and moving on from there to what the hell she's doing with a raider (Gage scowls), a… lady of many talents (Bishop tips her nonexistent hat), and a damn _courser._ (X6 stares expressionlessly back at him.) Sole promises answers _after_ they get out of here, which Nick can't really argue with, so off they go.

Back in Diamond City, Gage fucks off to sell off the scav they took off the Triggermen (Bishop tells him sweetly to maybe get a new eyepatch while he's at it) and Bishop heads off on her own, has to see a man about a dog and all that. Nick takes Sole and X6 back to the agency, where Ellie cries into his coat and then leaves them be, and Nick settles in to get his questions answered. She tells him the saga, asks for his help to find DiMa. Nick eyes her askance: you know I could never tell you no, darlin', but you and DiMa… It's important, Nick, she tells him, and laughs bitterly. A matter of life and death. Nick sighs and tells her he's up Far Harbor, built himself a little sanctuary for runaway synths and the like, out there in the fog. If Sole really wants to see him, Nick can get them a boat. I don't know about _want_ , she says. But I need to, so I'm gonna.

###### 

Meanwhile, Bishop is waiting up in the abandoned part of the stands, for Deacon to slip away and meet her. (Because, in case it wasn't sufficiently clear in the first story, Deacon is definitely alive, Bishop just lied to Sole about it because that's what she does.) Deacon has a lot of questions, starting with _what the fuck_ and moving on to _how the fuck_ with a quick but important side trip to _who the fuck,_ and she gives him the short rundown. Deacon's not slow to see the possibilities here - one of the many reasons she loves him - but he's also concerned, not just about the job but about her. About doing a job for Father - no, it's for Patriot, she's quick to correct him, it just happens to be the same job. He side-eyes her for that bit of hair-splitting, but it's important to her. She'll do whatever Patriot needs, always, but she's not doing anything for Father ever again.

What about the Commander, Deacon asks keenly, and she sighs and scrubs her hands over her face. She's maybe a little bit doing it for commander, she admits. It's not that she lives up to the legend, exactly; at the end of the day she's just a person, not a myth. But she's a good person, or at least she's trying very hard to be, and Bishop's about the last person on earth to judge someone for the difference. It's hard not to get at least a little attached. And whatever Father has her doing, Patriot wanted her to assist. And anyway she's going to go meet _DiMa_ , that's not the kind of chance you pass up. Weren't you the one that told me never to meet my heroes? Deacon points out, and she shoves him and says that's _different,_ his heroes were all dead or terrible.

They wind down the meet - she doesn't want to risk Sole coming to look for her, or God forbid, X6 - and then Deacon slips off while she waits for a minute before following. And then, like a death knell, she hears Gage say, Well that was interesting. She's shocked that _he_ managed to get the drop on _her,_ but he takes malicious amusement in reminding her he's not just a pretty face. (Ha, ha.) He kept the biggest raider gang on the east coast in line for years, you think he managed that with what, his sweet nature? Anyway, so that's your husband. Funny thing is, didn't I hear he was supposed to be dead? And not, say, alive, and also working for the Railroad, and conspiring behind the boss's back. Why, you planning on telling her? Bishop says disdainfully, in order to keep from panicking, but he just rolls his eyes. What would be the point? She's so far up that courser's asshole she can't see the light of day. Probably pat you on the back and think it's _romantic._

Bishop grimaces, because this is disturbingly plausible, though maybe not for the reasons Gage thinks. He doesn't know about Nate, she doesn't think; it's part of Collective history but she doubts it's part of Sole's legend in the wastes. But he's not wrong to be worried about... whatever the fuck is going on with X6. At least he's loyal? she offers up lamely, and Gage snorts and leans against the wall, taking out a cigarette. Loyal like a feral fucking dog, sure. Not likely to bite _her,_ but I'd sure hate to land in those crosshairs. Bishop hates the fact that Gage, of all fucking people, seems to be following the same train of thought as her, and she abruptly swipes out at him, gimme one of those fucking smokes, you asshole. He smirks, as if knowing exactly what's going on in her head, and offers it up. I'm just sayin', little liar girl. When that goes sideways, might be nice not to be the only who saw it comin', for a change.

She glares at him, trying to figure out his angle. Is he trying to drive a wedge between her and Sole? Trying to get some leverage on the commander? Trying to get leverage on _her?_ Or maybe just reflexively stirring the pot, just to see what floats up. She hates that she understands the impulse. We're not friends, she tells him. We're not allies. At the end of the day, I help people and you're a fucking raider. Yeah, he says, and exhales smoke. But I'm not wrong, neither.

###### 

Later that evening, X6 gets restless waiting for Sole to come down from the roof and goes up looking for her. She's sprawled out in a rickety wooden lounger, smoking and watching the city. He's concerned, and she admits that she came up for a smoke and then ran out of energy to go back down. He inquires after her meds, worry making him sharp, and she laughs bitterly: it's not the meds, buddy, it's me. I'm dying, there's only so much a bunch of chemicals can do to stop that. If they could, do you think I would've gone into that fucking pod in the first place? It'll… pass, she'll be fine tomorrow, she's just. Tired. Today was a lot. Which is extra concerning because she didn't even do any shooting, or at least not most of it; she had sniped Dino with the rifle he got her in Corvega, but that was all. The rest of the time she let him take point, and he'd been pleased about it at the time, but now he recognizes what she was taking pains to hide earlier: that she was too weak to do anything else. He wonders what he could have done differently - helped more, protected her better - but realizes with an awful cold fatality that it's not the fights that wiped her out. It's the travel. And there's nothing he can do, because they have to keep moving to complete the mission.

He asks her about DiMa, because he's never heard of this synth, and she grimaces. No, probably not a big part of Collective history anymore, or at least not the kind the scientists like to acknowledge. He was… a prototype, like Nick. They were testing different theories of cognition. One was transferring human minds into a synth body, that was Valentine. Or the one he ended up with, anyway, I'm told they tried out a few before they found one to stick. But DiMa was the model for purely artificial cognition; a homegrown intelligence, the first of his kind. All the Gen 3 chips are modeled after his design - with some tweaks, of course, there were some problems with the memory storage. By the time Nate got involved in the final stages of the project, DiMa had already been mothballed. But Nate found him - never could resist poking his nose in places best left alone - and Nate had realized what it meant, that DiMa was fully alive. It meant all the other synths were, too - except the Institute looked at them like tools, like pieces of hardware wrapped in meat, and Nate couldn't figure out how to get through to them. So he came to me.

He followed me on one of my missions topside, actually, she continues, while X6 listens spellbound. This is a part of Collective history he's never heard, not a hint or a whisper. He wonders if Father knows. This was back when the Park was just a park. There was a kind of outpost there, a few scientists who worked the cloning machine, but for the most part they left me alone and I returned the favor. But he followed me up, and… he presented it as a kind of hypothetical, at first. What would I do if. And - okay, I'm not a nice person, you've probably figured that, so my answer was that with something that entrenched into the system, the best way to handle it would probably be to assassinate the leaders, blow the base, and evac the refugees to a secondary location under your control. And then I realized it wasn't a hypothetical. And my answer was still the same.

Realization hits him like a hammer blow. It was _you_ , X6 says wonderingly. _You're_ the one that destroyed the old Institute. I thought it was some kind of reactor meltdown. Technically true, she says with a grimace; reactors tend to do that when you overload the core. Anyway. The plan went a little sideways; the old security chief figured out what was going on just in time to throw a giant wrench in the works. Someone had to stay behind to set it off manually. It was going to be me, it _should_ have been me, but Nate had DiMa knock me out and haul me to the relay with Shaun. And he stayed behind. And Conrad stayed behind with him. And I had to live. And that's why I hate DiMa.

X6 can't think of anything he can say to that; what can you say, in the face of something that big? But maybe she gets what she needs out of his silence anyway, because after a moment she says, I don't actually hate him, I don't know why I said that. I don't think I even did then. It wasn't his fault, not really. Nate would have figured it out one way or another, he always did care too much for his own good. The only thing that could have changed anything is if I conked him over the fucking head and shoved him in DiMa's arms myself, and I was too fucking slow, so. The only thing wrong with DiMa was that he loved Nate too much to tell him no, and how can I hate him for that? And if Nick is right about this sanctuary, then he's done a better job of upholding Nate's legacy than me.

X6 turns that over in his head. Legacy isn't a thing coursers have to consider much, but he understands purpose, working towards something that's bigger than yourself. The fact that the Collective was apparently founded in order that synths might be considered equal to humans is… something he can't really think about now, it's too big for him. He's a soldier; he's designed to do the task in front of him and leave the morals to the humans. But he can understand the idea of having your purpose perverted by something above you: how many times has he pulled off the impossible only to realize later that no one followed up on his work, or had a job go wrong because some analyst fucked the intel? It's the sense of futility, he understands, of wasted effort. Wasted _sacrifice._ A courser's place is to serve, always, but it's still enraging when some human with no knowledge of the world beyond the gates throws that service away for no good reason.

And Sole thinks that about _all the synths,_ X6 realizes with a shiver of horror. He can't imagine the size of that, all those lives on her shoulders - because they're _lives_ to her, and he's not sure he can feel that the way she clearly does but he can see the shape of it in her grief. They're all people to her; and more importantly they're _her people,_ the ones that Nathan Duvall died to protect. And Father threw that away.

I'm sorry, ma'am, he says helplessly, finally understanding the magnitude of the problem in a way he hadn't been able to before. She shrugs it away, smiling lopsidedly. It is what it is, she says. There's nothing I can do about it now. I just need to finish the mission. You need to _rest,_ he says sternly, and inclines his head towards the ladder. I can carry you down, if you'd allow me. No, I'm fine here, she says, and curls defensively into the chair. Have you ever been to Far Harbor? It's all fog out there. I want to see the stars while I still can. It's the fatalism in her voice that gets to him; she sounds like she doesn't expect to leave Far Harbor. It makes him frantic, worry a ceaseless churn under his breastbone. You'll… get cold, he tries, and she laughs and scoots over, tells him to come and keep her warm, then. She says it like a joke, like she knows he wouldn't really, but somehow he's moving anyway, across the roof and sitting down on the lounge next to her and shifting his arm along the back. _Oh,_ she says, nearly voiceless, but when he worriedly goes still he looks down to see her face soft and open, and she curls into his side like he was made to fit. Maybe he was. It certainly feels, right now, like whatever purpose they had in mind when they made him, this is what he's actually for.

He doesn't sleep much that night. Just lies awake and watches the stars she loves so much, and enjoys the soft sound of her breath as she sleeps.

###### 

The next day they roll into Goodneighbor, Sole and her team and Nick all together. Nick's got a lead on a guy who can rent them a boat, it should be a quick stop and then down to the docks. At the gate they're met by Finn who tries his shakedown routine, which goes poorly for him when Sole backs him right down with a bit of swagger and menace, threatening to skin him alive. (X6 comes over a bit heart-eyed about the display, and Bishop exchanges a rueful look with Gage, who just rolls his eye back at her.) And while Finn might not have recognized her, the same can't be said of Daisy, who still knows her from back in the day, when she was just Bloody Bennett, kicking around the wastes and making it a little bit better with every bullet. Nick goes off with Gage to set up the meet while Sole and Daisy have their reunion, and Sole asks her if the Rex is still open for business - it is, and Clare still behind the desk, if you can believe it. No shit, really? Yeah, runs the place with an iron fist. Spite will keep that woman going when the rest of the world shrivels up and dies, you mark my words. Well, hell, maybe I'll pay her a visit.

Sole’s a better liar than Bishop gives her credit for, or maybe Bishop just didn't know to look: she honestly doesn't realize anything was wrong until they get to the hotel and Sole decides to get a couple of rooms for everybody. Bishop is frowning, wondering why, and it's because as soon as there aren't any eyes on her she collapses like a puppet with cut strings. X6 catches her - in case Bishop ever forgot to be terrified of him, there's him moving literally faster than she can see, yay - and expressionlessly carries her up to the second floor room. He gently lays her down on the bed, asks what he can do. She tells him she smelled chems, there's probably a dealer here, see if he can get- and she rattles off a couple of things Bishop doesn't recognize. X6 nods, takes her shotgun out of the holster and places it gently in her hands, and goes, not without a burning look at Bishop that says he expects the commander in one piece when he gets back and it's Bishop's job to keep her that way.

It's not that Bishop didn't know she was sick, was the thing. Maybe she was a little slow on the uptake for someone who calls herself a spy, but she's not stupid, either; she put it together eventually. When someone seems to perk up every time they take a hit off a flask but never gets drunk and never smells like booze, it's a fair bet there's something other than alcohol in it. And it's the only thing that made sense, about why the commander might have gone back into cryo in the first place. At first she might have thought that Sole had just gotten tired of the world and didn't care about the people in it, but that was so demonstrably untrue it had to be something else. Put together with the rest, and it pretty much had to be an illness, the kind that had no cure even with Collective wonder tech.

But she didn't realize it was this bad. And that's probably because Sole is a master of hiding weakness, and she had X6 to help her mask. A lot of the protective behavior Bishop has privately been joking about rearranges itself. Oh good christ, no wonder X6 has gotten so attached. Bad enough she was both a soldier who shared his talents and a commander he genuinely respected, but now it turns out she's vulnerable and in need of his protection? She couldn't have been more custom-tailored to a courser's sensibilities if someone stitched her like a goddamn coat.

How long, Bishop says quietly, and Sole tips a shoulder, not looking at her. I don't know. A few days, a week, two maybe? Not long. And it moves fast by the end. Jesus Christ, no wonder X6 has been getting more uptight: his commander is running out of time. Is there anything I can do, Bishop asks, and Sole shakes her head. Just- don't tell the others. Uhhh well I hate to break it to you but I'm pretty sure X6 has figured it out, Bishop says, just to be a brat, and Sole rolls her eyes at her. And… Gage is probably pretty close to figuring it out too, she admits, more seriously. It's obvious in retrospect; X6 told Gage to take point on the way here from Diamond City, and since X6 doesn't trust Gage further than a human could throw him, the only reason he'd do that is if Sole couldn't do it herself. Gage isn't stupid, unfortunately. Well, then don't tell Nick, Sole says, with the air of admitting the core of her request. He's not going to… judge you for it, Bishop says, probing for what could make someone worry more about a friend they trusted than a raider at their back, and Sole just looks tired: he'll feel _guilty,_ kid.

Bishop pushes a little more, chronically incapable of not taking advantage of someone's weakness even as she feels vaguely like she should feel guilty herself, and Sole admits that she's… maybe a little more advanced than Shaun would have realized. She hid it, those last few weeks in the Commonwealth, because she was helping Nick settle some old business from back when he was human. And Nick's not an idiot, so if he realizes how bad off she is, he'll know she was dragging her heels back then and he'll feel like shit, and she never wanted that so we're all keeping our traps _shut,_ you hear? Yes ma'am, Bishop says smartly, just as X6 comes back with a bundle of hypos. He looks at Bishop a little suspiciously, not unaware of the tension in the room, but when Sole sits up he forgets about Bishop and sits on the bed next to her. That chemist seemed… overly fond of his own product, but he had what you asked for, X6 says, and Sole smiles at him and puts a hand over his, tells him she's sure it'll be plenty. X6 looks back at her helplessly, worry and affection plain on his stern face, and Bishop quietly gets up and pads out of the room, closing the door behind her.

###### 

She's waiting on the stairway when Nick and Gage come back about an hour later, Nick a little perplexed about what's going on: weren't they going to press on? Well, the commander figured the trip would involve less shooting if we go at night, Bishop says, making it sound like she's irritated. Nice for _some_ people who can see in the dark, I guess. Anyway, we're gonna hunker for a few hours, if you want to catch some shut eye - _can_ you catch some shut-eye? I don't run into many Gen 2's these days. Ah, put a sock in it, Nick says, sounding tired. Could use a good sit-down, if it's going on offer. Bishop tosses him a key, says room 204 - _not_ 203, commander and X looked like they were going to make good use of the time, ifyouknowwhatimean. Nick sighs again and heads off, leaving Bishop and Gage alone on the steps. He studies her a minute, then sits down one step below her, stretching out his legs with a groan, and offers up a cigarette. Gage, you asshole, they _count_ if I don't steal them, she tells him pettishly, and he rolls his eye and shakes the pack at her and she takes it with ill grace.

How bad is it, he says, with absolutely no change of tone, and Bishop takes her time lighting the cigarette and shakes out the match before she answers. It's bad. Don't tell Nick, she'll skin you and then me. Yeah, I'm the sharin' type, he drawls, and exhales smoke. _Shit_ , he adds, after a moment, surprisingly fervent, and she barks a laugh: you said it, pal. This DiMa guy, he going to do anything? Fuck if I know, Bishop sighs. Depends on what's going on with Father and his _fucking_ scavenger hunt. Maybe she's just the world's most tragic messenger girl, it sounds like him. Gage studies her for a minute: what's up with you and this Father guy, anyway? He's the head of the Collective, Bishop spells out like he's an idiot, we're sort of mortal enemies. Yeah, like a mosquito is to a brahmin, Gage mutters, and grins at her glare. It's personal with you though, you poker up any time he's mentioned. Yeah, like that. Does Boss know you hate her kid's guts?

Just more reflexive shit-stirring, probably, but he seems genuinely curious, for a soulless snake, and she's maybe a little more shaken about Sole's revelation than she wants to admit, so. He… was the one that turned me in, she admits. Most recomm orders come down through SRB, someone tells someone who tells a courser, but he marked me for recomm _personally._ I didn't even do anything, didn't break any rules or anything, but I'd been assigned to clean his lab and I guess he thought I was getting a little too curious so he tagged me for aberrant behavior. If it wasn't for Patriot I would have been dead twenty years ago. He did some computer magic, got me lost in the system and helped me find my way out. So yeah, I hate Father's guts. But that isn't going to stop me from fulfilling my fucking mission. I'm a damn professional. Worse things to be, Gage says absently, and she frowns at him, teasing to cover up real curiosity: shit, that was almost nice, as you feeling alright? Ah, shut it, he says, just thinking is all. What happens if we find this DiMa guy, and there's no cure? Well, you won't get your payday, that's for sure, she says maliciously, and he rolls his eye and flicks ash at her. I'm serious, he says, and for once he does kind of look like it. And it's not without reason, either. Sole herself just admitted Father wouldn't know how far gone she is. Whatever he's planning, will it even be possible if Sole dies? Does Father even care? 

I… don't know, Bishop admits. I just… don't know.

###### 

It's around midnight when they make it to the docks; Bishop did some fast thinking there to cover for her, and Sole is grateful. She's also tired as fuck, but the chems are keeping her on her feet for now, though she's pretty sure she's going to crash when she stops moving. Problem for later, problem for later. Right now, she's just focusing on the next step in front of her, and the one after that. Step one: get the boat moving. Problem with step one: the boat won't start.

Nick starts cursing the friend who lent it to him, but Sole just laughs, punchy with relief: she's been waiting for the other shoe to drop, and here it is, and it's actually something she can handle. Move over, you useless excuse for a wrench jockey, she tells Nick, who splutters that it's been just as long since _she_ turned a wrench so what the hell does she think she's doing-! But she's already crawling under the boat, and Nick grumbles and curses and settles down to hand her tools. Just like old times, she tells him, and old times nothing, he says, back in the day _he_ was fixing things and she was the tool monkey, she's remembering things backwards. Sole has to bite back a comment about his memory because it wouldn't be kind, though she would be right: she was thinking about one specific time, the time she first met him, to be exact. He'd still been a handyman then, and there had been a problem with one of the generators he couldn't fix. She'd offered to take a look at it, he'd grumbled about wasteland mercs but let her try, and by the time she'd got it running again they'd already been well on their way to friendship.

It doesn't matter that he doesn't remember that, she tells herself, not for the first time. He remembers the things that matter. She's got the same goddamn aging brain he does, just meat instead of wires, it's not like she's still got everything knocking around up there either, not after almost sixty years. If something gets lost between the cracks, she can remind him.

Then again, she thinks, pausing to ride out a rush of vertigo that grays her vision and weakens her arms, she might not be around to remind him all that much longer.

###### 

With the boat running again, they all pile in and take off. Nick takes the rudder with a glare at Sole and she allows it with an amused look, although probably part of the reason is because she's visibly exhausted, a gray tinge to her already pale skin. X6 takes up position at the front of the boat and she drifts up after him, minutes later she's asleep on his shoulder. Gage gives Bishop a pointed look and sprawls out in the middle, stretching out as best he can in the cramped space and to all appearances immediately falling asleep. Bishop is left in the back of the boat with Nick, who says he'd offer his shoulder but she'd find it a mite uncomfortable, made of plastic and all. She demurs that she's not tired, which is true enough; she doesn't have courser endurance but even regular synths need less sleep than humans, and she got a catnap earlier at the Rex.

Besides, she doesn't think she could sleep if she wanted to, all of the worries and contingency plans running through her head like a herd of brahmin. Everything hinges on what they find at Acadia, and Bishop hates uncertainty like a cat hates a bath. She's survived this long by knowing all the exits and playing all the angles, and there's so much riding on this. The commander's life, the future of the Collective, the liberation of her people - the cause that Bishop has worked her entire life to see through, and right now there's not a damn thing she can do but wait. Not really her strong suit; Deacon always handled that part better than her. Bishop always wants to be out there, _doing_ something, _talking_ to people, getting the job done. She had enough of stillness and silence in the Collective.

Well, if you're not gonna sleep, maybe you can keep an old synth company instead, Nick offers, after a minute. Got a long ride up. Well, I do love talking, Bishop says modestly. What's your poison? Maybe you can tell me a bit about what's been going on, these past couple weeks. Bishop hedges: I thought the commander would have filled you in already? You spend enough time around Sole, you get to learn when she's leaving stuff out, Nick says. So how about it, kid?

Bishop tells him a somewhat edited version of the tale, playing Sole's heroism up and her own participation down, and leaving out her illness entirely, of course. Nick's a good listener, makes all the right noises at all the right moments, and Bishop lets the time spool by, letting herself get lost in the world she's spinning, where everything's just that littlest bit shinier and more hopeful, all the rough edges filed off. She's not as compulsive about lying as Deacon is, but this is why it's never bothered her, either: when everything's fucked, there's something comforting in making up something better. Sometimes it's the only kind of power you've got.

After it's done Nick goes off into a story of his own, some goofy case they worked together back in the day, and then at her urging another one after that, and another. Bishop drinks them all in, hungry for a view into the world before the Collective closed itself off as much as the insight into the commander. Eventually Nick works his way around to the last case they worked together, tells her about Eddie Winter, about Sole schlepping all around the Commonwealth just to help him get some closure. Which leads to him admitting, quietly enough even X6 would strain to hear, that he knew how sick she was the whole time. That woman never could lie to me worth a damn, he sighs, hand steady on the rudder. But if she wanted the dignity of dying quiet, I figured it wasn't my business to take that from her, y'know? He starts, seeming to realize what he's admitted, and eyes her sidelong: you won't tell her, will you, Miss Bishop?

Bishop thinks back to Sole in that shitty hotel room, telling her that Nick can never know the cost, while here's Nick brooding over his sleeping friend, sitting on that secret all these years, and has to clear her throat before she can answer. Don't worry, she tells him, not without a sense of irony. Your secret is safe with me.

###### 

**ACT TWO: ACCELERATION**

###### 

The folks at Far Harbor are not usually welcoming of strangers, especially so late at night it's mostly morning, but luckily Nick isn't a stranger here, though it's been a couple years since he came up this way. Nick's surprised, doesn't think it's been that long, but when X6 looks at Sole in concern he sees that she looks sad, so he infers this isn't a new problem. Of course, he thinks; Nick has been in continuous operation for more than sixty years, far longer than any synth was meant to last. His internal storage must be overwriting itself attempting to code new memories. Current Collective policy has synths wiped well before they get to that point, but X6 knows Father has investigated the issue with Curie, who had well over a century of stored experience even before she was transferred into her current form.

Every once in a while someone gets frustrated that such an important person had such a scatterbrained assistant and gently suggests that Father replace Curie with a less flawed model, but Father has always been smilingly unyielding on the subject. No one has ever been willing to press the matter; it was generally understood that Father of all people should be allowed a bit of sentiment if he wished. Thinking on it now, it's a little odd to X6 that he was always so insistent. Surely his demonstrated attachment to a synth must have been a political weakness over the years, and Father was generally a ruthless man, when he needed to be. There must be something about Curie that was too important for him to give up.

Back in the present, Sole is all for them pushing onwards to Acadia, and X6 isn't sure whether it's because now that she's within arm's reach of her mission's end she just wants to stagger over the finish line or if she's genuinely unsure if she stops moving she'll be able to start again. Either way, he's trying to think of a way to tactfully tell her there's not a chance in hell he's going to let her go anywhere without some real sleep when there's an alarm from the landward side of town, and everyone exchanges a look before they take off running.

###### 

When they get there there's a veritable horde of giant mutated amphibians attacking the Hull, which seems a pretty good reason for an alarm to Sole. She shouts at Nick if this is _normal_ for this island and he shouts back oh yeah, we do this all the time! Walk in the park! Coulda just said no, Sole mutters to herself, unholstering her shotgun with grim determination. If she has to go through a horde of mutated amphibians to get to DiMa, she'll go through the damn horde. Hopefully there might even be something of her left standing on the other side.

A hand on hers stops her before she can go to the gate. I don't think so, ma'am, X6 says, and at some point she's going to tell him he only calls her that anymore when he's trying to get away with something. That point isn't going to be now, however, because he's looking at her steadily over the tops of his shades and she can see a familiar steely resolve reflected back at her. It's the first time he's ever denied her anything, and predictably, he's not going in with everything less than what he's got. Alright, she says, and lets go of the shotgun, surrendering it to his custody. But keep your comms open or I'm going in after you, you hear me? Loud and clear, ma'am, he says, and flicks at his communit, his next words coming in twinned in her ear. I'm at your disposal.

Sole turns and walks away before she does something stupid like kiss him, or cry. Gage! she shouts, and a familiar half-shaved head pops up from the crowd. X6 is going in, you're on covering fire. Next to him Bishop demands _on foot?_ but Gage only nods: what's she going to do? High ground, she calls, and pulls her rifle off her back. Stay out of my kill box unless you want to join them. She doesn't bother to tell him to look after Bishop; by now it goes without saying. He's a stone cold son of a bitch, is Gage, but they understand each other just fine.

She clambers up onto the Hill and then pulls herself up onto the edge of a nearby rooftop, ignoring the protesting creak of her joints. _Just a little longer,_ she promises them, and wiggles out onto her belly, tugging her rifle up with her right hand. With the other she gropes into her pocket for the hypo she didn't tell X6 about, flicks the cap off the end with a practiced thumbnail, and jams the needle into her thigh. Calmex flooding through her veins, she lays her cheek down along her rifle, sights in on the nearest giant guppy, and starts pulling the trigger.

###### 

Gage is regretting the decision not to just start walking after Corvega and not stop until he left the Commonwealth. He could have gone down to - Florida, maybe, they didn't get winters that far south and he's heard some interesting things about the gangs down there. Or hell, maybe he could have headed home to Texas, surely most of his old enemies had killed each other off by now. And if not, well, it at least had to be safer and saner than _whatever the fuck he was doing now._

But: make your choices, live with the consequences, that's what he's always said, and his last chance to hit the eject button on this little caper died round about the time he climbed into the boat, so. He shoves another mag into Mason's shitty pink stock - ugh, he's glad _that_ moron's dead, at least - and grimly unloads another round into the heaving shiny-wet flank of another one of those fucking frog things, just like he's been doing for the last five minutes. He's starting to run low on bullets, and they don't seem to be running low on bodies, which is not a good combination. They're starting to pile up in front of the gate, making hazardous terrain for the dumb fucking courser who went out there on foot. He'd started a ways out, using the treeline as a choke point, but the pileup of corpses and the relentless tide of reinforcements had forced him back into the open clearing right in front of the gate, where at least the others could try and get a decent shot at the things. As decent as they can get, anyway; there's a couple of good shooters in the lot, but mostly they're enthusiastic amateurs at best. Fishers and trappers, the lot of them. They wouldn't last one minute against Gage's usual crowd, but luckily for them his current companions were more in line to give than take. Stupid fuckers.

_And stupid me for following them,_ he reminds himself, and keeps shooting. And maybe that would have been enough - probably, that would have been enough, especially with the robot wonder down there and the boss up high with William Black's treasured fifty cal, rest in fucking pieces, asshole - except that one of the frog-things, the kind with the dangly bit on its head, heaves in a gasping breath that seems to go forever and then spits a giant glob of something right at the boss's sniper nest.

Gage doesn't see the immediate aftermath, he's too busy ducking the rain of debris that showera down from above. But when he straightens up and peers over the edge, he sees a small muddied form huddled down on the ground, curled up like they're in pain, and X6 standing over her like an avenging angel, with the frog things closing in. _Ah, shit,_ he thinks, deeply resigned to his own stupid fucking decisions, and then he slaps a horrified Bishop on the back of the head, yells _Cover me!_ and then jumps down after them.

###### 

X6 doesn't know what happens next. No, that's not entirely accurate: he _remembers_ what happens next, afterwards, with his usual clarity, but he doesn't seem to _experience_ it, as it's happening. He's been told that happens sometimes, when someone is panicked or experiencing a major surge of adrenaline in a life-or-death situation. He wouldn't know; courser modification dampens adrenal response and training accounts for the rest. It's never happened to him before.

But when it's over the beasts are dead and his commander is not, which is the important thing - or so he thinks, until she tries to stand and her leg is broken in multiple places. They're going to have to use a stimpak, several stimpaks, in order to even get her up, and even then it will take days to heal. And the use of stimpaks had been strictly forbidden because they'd hasten the progress of her degeneration. Yeah, we're way past that, buddy, Sole says, and he realizes in an awful cold rush the thing she's been carefully not saying all this time: that it might already be too late. That there might not be a way to save her at all.

He takes a moment, then sets it aside and does what he needs to: splints up her leg, administers stimpaks, then picks her up and carries her back to the hotel. The locals are impressed and willing enough to offer rooms for that day. X6 gets her settled and then follows her teasing orders to go and get cleaned up, doing his best to tease back like normal. And then when he's alone in the bathroom he just leans on the edge of the sink and breathes, and breathes, and breathes.

###### 

X6 comes down to the common room after the rest of them have already finished breakfast, damp around the edges and with a forbidding expression on his face. Bishop kicks out a chair and wordlessly goes to get him a plate, patting his shoulder as he goes. And he doesn't even glare at her for it, which is how she knows it's bad. When she comes back he's in a low-voiced discussion with Nick about how far it is to Acadia, his face falling when he finds out it's halfway across the island. She slaps the plate down in front of him and tells him to eat up, soldier, before she sprawls back into the seat across from him. He gives her a look of vague suspicion but it doesn't stop him from falling to the food like a famished dog. Well, he probably worked up an appetite, all that slaughtering he did. The locals have all been whispering about it, and Bishop can't blame them. He was amazing out there this morning, even Bishop has to admit that. Terrifying, naturally, but also amazing.

She's never really seen coursers work up close like that. Well, mostly if they're that close to you you're probably about to die, but still. No wonder SRB keeps them on such a short leash, brainwashed to the party line. If a regular synth goes rogue, the best they could hope for is a peaceful escape. If a courser goes rogue, they could wreck the fucking _house._ And X6 is the best of the best. Which makes her wonder what Father was _thinking,_ sending him out on a mission like this. Surely he had to know that Sole would get to him, right? Or did he just assume that his mother didn't actually have opinions of her own that might interfere with his plans?

Nick clears his throat, not blind to the undercurrents at the table. We've been talking about that, actually, he says, and it takes her a second to wrestle her brain back to the subject of transport. They don't get too many gearheads up this way, not like you do in the Commonwealth, but they've got a couple old trucks. I'm going to go take a look and see if I can't get any of them running. I don't have Sole’s way with engines, but I'm not too shabby with a wrench, no matter what she says. And I'm going to hunt down some fuel, Gage adds. Bishop here was talking to the locals, there's some pre-War construction equipment we should be able to scav up enough coolant to get it running. X6 pauses, looking between the three of them, and Bishop waspishly points out it's not like she's going to be up for any hiking, at least not for a couple days. Unspoken is the knowledge that she might not _have_ a couple of days, though by this point surely there's no one at the table who doesn't know. Though they won't _say_ it, out of some superstitious fear that saying it aloud will make it true. What a bunch of morons they all are.

Don't worry, son, Nick says, into the quiet that follows. We'll get her to Acadia. DiMa will help her, you'll see.

###### 

The trip out to Acadia isn't the _most_ miserable thing Sole’s ever done, not by a long shot, but it isn't fun, either. The roads are pitted even worse than the Commonwealth - maybe something with all the fucking fog? - and Nick hasn't exactly done a lot of driving since he woke up chrome, but it's more than the others have done. Sole volunteered but got immediately glared down in unison, an oddly impressive fit of coordination on their parts, and she decided to accede more or less gracefully and let X6 help her into the bed instead. Bishop is in the cab with Nick, consulting her map for directions, and Gage is riding in the back with them, rifle in his lap and his gaze sharp on their surroundings.

Sole lies down at X6's gentle urging, pillowing her cheek on his muscled thigh, but she finds she can't sleep, though normally she could knock right the fuck out in way worse conditions this. She can't even blame the pain; Med-X has her floating. She just… worries too much. And not even about any of the useful things she should be worrying about. No, she's worried about meeting DiMa. All of this they've done to track him down, and she still hasn't figured out what to say when she sees him. _Hey there, long time no see?_ Fucking pathetic. _Do_ you _know why my son decided to be a monster?_ Ugh.

She hasn't gotten any closer to an answer by the time they pull up to the complex and are greeted with rifles pointed at their heads. Nick gets out, says they're with him, it's been a while but surely someone up there remembers him. The courser in the lead orders them to disarm, which the others do (reluctantly, in Gage's case) but X6 refuses. If they pose no threat to the Commander then they will have none from him in turn; if he'd come to assault this little… enclave (said with all due disdain) he would not have come in the open, in daylight, in this rattletrap vehicle. Any other day Sole might almost enjoy the show, but today they're playing nice and it's pointless, besides. If DiMa wants her dead all he has to do is just… not save her. All the rifles in the world won't make a difference there.

X6 isn't happy about it, but he surrenders at her hand on his sleeve, and only partially because she needs to lean on him in order to limp inside. Chase leads them inside, to where DiMa sits, surrounded by servers. He's less broken than Nick, less weathered, but the modifications he's made to himself don't look comfortable or safe. Sole sucks in a breath at the sight of him - and he doesn't need to breathe but does the same when his blind eyes alight on her.

Oh, old friend, he tells her, sorrow in his voice. We don't have much time, do we? Come, sit, and I'll explain everything.

###### 

Okay, this section is a lot less defined. But basically, DiMa was going to go into full infodump mode, starting with the big reveal of something that may or may not have been obvious to readers but certainly wasn't obvious to Bishop: specifically, the fact that Father and Patriot were one and the same. This is also the answer to Sole’s question about what happened to Shaun, how he could go so wrong: he didn't. He just lost control, and now he's the head of the Collective in name only.

So what happened was, a few years after Sole went into cryo Shaun had still been working on a cure, intensely enough that he was losing track of things that weren't his work and increasingly relying on other directors to handle park politics. Into this vacuum came Zimmer, Sole's replacement as the head of the SRB, who had been quietly pushing to overturn Collective policies about synth independence, in quiet whispers where Shaun wouldn't notice. He engineered an attack: he kidnapped a couple of synths, ones with decently senior positions and some amount of respect, and wiped them and loaded them with rudimentary attack protocols and pointed them at Shaun. Shaun had survived, barely, because Curie had intervened at the last moment, but the damage had been done. While Shaun lay in a coma, Zimmer quietly moved to consolidate power. There weren't a lot of open synth sympathizers left, and even for those that didn't believe the synths had actually glitched out on their own, it was still a compelling point towards Zimmer's argument. After all, _humans_ couldn't be wiped and reprogrammed, now could they?

(If Sole had been there, she could have explained to them, in great detail, just how untrue that was. But she hadn't been there, or things would have been very different indeed.)

So anyway, Shaun wakes up from his coma, and Zimmer makes a few things clear to him about how things are going to go. And Shaun has to decide whether to fight back and hope that there's enough of his mother's old cohort to support him, or keep his head down and play along, and the latter seems considerably less likely to end up with him martyring himself to a hopeless cause. So Shaun went along with it, and had to set aside his search for Sole's cure in order to start playing politics like his life depended on it. He pretended to be convinced by Zimmer's argument, and over time Zimmer even seemed to believe it, but Shaun couldn't get enough influence to move openly against Zimmer, and by the time he might have been able to pull it off, the concept of synth inhumanity was so entrenched in the culture that he knew he'd never get any traction on that front. He decided he'd follow his parents' example, and work towards a revolution instead.

Not being either of his parents, he had to be cautious about it. He started small, freeing just a few synths here and there, jiggering paperwork and work schedules so that they wouldn't be missed. He wasn't very successful at first; SRB had coursers, now, and none of the current-gen synths had any knowledge of the world outside of the park. In fact, you, Miss Bishop, were one of his first successes, DiMa adds, heedless of the complete meltdown this inspires in Bishop. She inspired him to keep trying, and over time he managed to cobble together a protocol that seemed to inspire better-than-even odds in survival outside of the gates. And so he pressed onwards, trying to figure out a way to spark a revolution, working slowly but surely towards his goal… until five years ago, when he was diagnosed with the same disease that had taken Sole. And then he knew he was running out of time.

This is when he reached out to Acadia. He'd been going through his father's papers, trying to find some answers or at least inspiration for the man he wanted to live up to, and found out about DiMa. He had by this point suborned a number of synths still inside the park, including Chase - X6 knows her, of course; she was Father's personal guard before X6. He'd used her to track down DiMa and carry messages for the better part of a year before someone in SRB got suspicious and they had to burn her cover; she's been here in Acadia ever since. After that Shaun judged it was too risky to use a courser again, so he resorted to using escapees and Railroad contacts in order to keep messages and tech moving. Nick's a little offended that no one reached out to _him_ for help, but unfortunately Nick was too visible; he would have been detected immediately. And they couldn't risk that, not when they'd finally gotten so close to the answer.

You see, they'd always known that as long as recall codes existed, any attempt at sweeping change was doomed to fail. And scrambling individual codes in the database wouldn't work, because all modern synth chips had base default codes that could still be broadcast across the park in case of emergency. The only way it could work would be to remove the functionality from the chips entirely, and it would have to be done all in one go; trying to recode synths individually would take too long and have too much possibility of failure. Shaun had spent years working on a virus that would do exactly that, and with DiMa's help it was finally ready for deployment. All he'd needed to do was get the code to DiMa: which Sole had already done, all-unwitting. It was on the holotape he'd given her.

DiMa, for his part, had been working on a way to deploy the virus. The problem was that all signals were monitored in the park, so they couldn't use a broadcast, and trying to manually scramble one at a time would never work; the coursers would catch them well before they hit critical mass. But the existence of coursers gave him an idea: courser chips had a rudimentary 'ping' system built in so that they could track escaped synths. It wasn't often used anymore, since the Railroad had figured out how to disable the receiver and did so on all escapees, but the point was that the courser broadcast worked as a short-range point-to-point, which meant it couldn't be tracked by the park monitoring system. The chip wasn't designed to send a full data packet, of course, but DiMa had been able to build a new chip, one that would deploy code to the synth update protocol on the automated ping system. Someone with that chip, loaded with that virus, would become a walking bomb if they could get into a dense population of Collective synths.

And at first, they all look at X6. But DiMa catches on and explains: no, they can't modify an existing courser, otherwise he would have done so to Chase already. They had to create a fresh synth with the chip pre-installed; Shaun had been smuggling the parts for a bio-print creche for the better part of a year. And neither can they transfer a synth into another body; they tried that and the results were… overwhelmingly negative. Apparently synthetic consciousness is "grown" around the chip over time; transfer to a different model resulted in complete breakdown. Neither could they use a human brain; it takes time for organic consciousness to adjust to synthetic input, and the shift from full organic to a synthetic core had… also not gone well. Shaun had theorized that a human with significant synthetic enhancements would be able to make the transition safely, but there were only two known humans with that level of modification: Shaun himself, and Sole. And while smuggling Shaun out of the park would have been nearly impossible, Sole was outside the gates, nearly forgotten by almost anyone in power, and dying. Shaun hadn't even given up on looking for a cure, but this was the only way he knew how to save her life. For herself, and for the good of the Collective, Sole was going to become a courser.

###### 

So obviously, everyone was going to have a lot of feelings about this.

Poor Nick is having feelings about, essentially, something being done to his best friend that was done to him. The circumstances are very different, obviously, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have a lot of latent trauma around the concept. But he also doesn't want to watch his friend die; he just wants it to have been her choice. And maybe there is some guilt over her delaying her cryo all those years ago, that maybe there would be more options if she hadn't, or even just more time to make the decision now. But she can honestly tell him that she didn't regret it then and still doesn't now, that it meant a lot to her to spend her last days doing something that meant something, something for a friend who'd always been there for her. And maybe even a bit of selfish satisfaction that one of them could get closure; she knew she was going to her end without any of her own. And the fact of the matter is, she's not afraid of this _because_ of Nick: he's the best man she knows, how can she be worried about what she'll be on the other side when she knows how he turned out?

In DiMa's corner, he's always regretted the way things played out all those years ago, and especially regretted that the death of the man they both loved dearly made them lash out instead of draw together. In some sense DiMa has felt like working with Shaun was a second chance, and not just to save his people. He always wondered what Sole would think of it, if she knew, and now she's here and can say that she's glad of it. That she was always sorry too, that she was the one who put him in touch with Nick the first time - which was supposed to have been a secret, but apparently DiMa has known the whole time, and had treasured the implicit forgiveness, especially after she went into cryo and he lost the chance to offer his own. There's a sweet moment between the two of them as she watches Faraday bustling around some power station and teases him that he still has a thing for doctors, huh? And he replies with grave earnestness that Nate was a singular man, beyond replacement; the world will not see his like again.

Bishop, perhaps not surprisingly, got her fucking _world_ rocked by this revelation. She's spent the last twenty years somewhat defining herself by hating Father as much as she admired Patriot, and to find out they were the same man - that she's been hating the wrong enemy all this time - it's something she struggles even to know _what_ she feels about it, it's so huge. She doesn't know if she can handle this; she's had to upend everything she knew about herself and the world around her once, when Father forced her out of the park. To find out that he did it to _save_ her, that's… hard. A very hard thing to process. And it's Gage who's the one to finally snap her out of it: what does it _matter_ what some Collective asshole did or didn't intend for her? She made her own choices and she has to live with the consequences. You can't let yourself get caught up in the grand meaning of things, not if you want to get any actual work done. It's harsh and unsympathetic and exactly what she needed to hear, and she thanks him with a wordless clap to the shoulder and a marginally-less-vicious than usual comment as she heads off to get back to work.

Oddly enough, X6 is handling these revelations better than Bishop, somewhat to everyone's surprise. But he's not stupid, and he's been paying attention these past couple weeks. He hadn't exactly figured out he was Patriot, but as far as he's concerned, it's a simple logical deduction. If Sole is the founder of the Collective, and Sole is horrified at what the Collective has become, then obviously the current state of things in the Collective, however sensible to X6, is wrong and in need of correction. Either Father had been responsible for the change, deliberately carrying out a reversal of everything his mother worked to build - unlikely, given his obvious affection and reverence - or Father had been working behind the scenes to overturn it. Since they were on a top-secret mission very much outside of the Collective's knowledge, the latter seems the most obvious.

Which isn't to say it's not a lot to take in; it is. But he's less concerned with what this "means" and more concerned with what they're going to do next. He's been getting through the last few days of Sole's rapid deterioration by the skin of his teeth, fixed on the certainty that there would be a cure waiting for her at the other end of this ridiculous scavenger hunt, that surely Father wouldn't have given her into his care only for him to lose her to something he can't fight. And now they're here, and Sole's going to live after all - _if_ she's willing to become a synth. Become a courser, just like him. And _that_ is something he has no idea how to feel about it. He's enjoyed being her guard, her protector, but he remembers that fight under Corvega, too - that sense of _rightness_ , two bodies moving in tandem. If she's a courser, he could have that _all the time._ But then she'd be a courser, and coursers are meant to serve. Sole is a commander, not a soldier. Can she be a courser and still be his commander? And if she can, what does that say about what it means to be a courser?

A concern that hasn't exactly passed Sole by, either. She isn't actually having the existential crisis that everyone seems to expect her to have, probably because she's been upgrading herself piecemeal for years now. She's probably more polymer than bone at this point anyway; the leap to fully synthetic isn't as drastic as all that, given the givens. The real surprise is that no one ever thought of this back _before_ she went on ice. A lot of things might have been different, if they had. But however alluring she finds the idea of leaving behind this dying sack of bones, she knows that it's not going to be as simple as that. And while she can handle Nick's breakdown on the subject, she can't figure out what the fuck is going on in X6's head. She's pretty sure they've been heading somewhere, the two of them, even if they haven't spoken of it, and now she's going to live - for, uh, quite a long time actually, assuming they don't all die horribly assaulting the park - and they're going to have all of the time in the world to explore that, but she doesn't know if he's going to be able to meet her there. And that's not something she can really do anything about; he's going to have to figure it out himself.

Either way, it doesn't change what she needs to do. Shaun needs her, simple as that. God, to think she _doubted_ him, when all this time he's been so clever and so brave and worked so hard to make things right. _Oh baby, it was never your fault,_ she thinks, heart aching; it was hers, all this time. She was the one who didn't notice the fracture lines growing under her feet, she was the one who hadn't been paying attention. No, let's be honest: she'd been checked out those last few years, pure and simple. Spent more time in the wastes than doing her goddamn job, and look at the price everyone paid. Fucking _Zimmer,_ the rat-faced bastard, she should have known better than to ever trust him and instead she'd let him practically run the joint. Given how fast he moved after she was gone, he had to have been working up to it for years, and she never noticed. And not only did he upturn everything she'd built, everything Nate had fought and fucking _died_ for, he'd damn near killed her son to do it! Oh, she's going to take him to pieces; she's going to wreck his entire fucking _life,_ and rebuild hers on the ashes. She'll make it right, one way or another.

No matter what it costs her.

###### 

Once Sole gives her assent to the transfer, DiMA and Faraday waste no time setting it up. Everyone drifts through as they're finishing up: Bishop with joking encouragement, Nick with quiet sincerity, even Gage with some derogatory comments about this crazy bullshit that manages to contain something that could be construed as well-wishes, if you tilt your head and squint. The only one who doesn't is X6: he waits in the back corner of the room, watching everyone come and go. Eventually everything's set up, and all that's left is to knock her out and start the transfer. Faraday looks between her and X6, and then hands the hypo to her and awkwardly pats her shoulder before leaving and closing the door behind him.

It's actually the first time they've been alone together since they got the rundown from DiMa. She'd tried to track him down a couple times, to let him talk it out like Nick, but she hadn't been able to find him. He was thinking, he tells her quietly. Yeah, she can guess what about, she laughs bitterly, and sits up, setting aside the hypo. Hey. Will you at least come over here?

He detaches himself from his convenient pool of shadow and crosses the room, kneels down next to the lounger. Their heads are almost at a level. I want to promise you that nothing has to change, she says, after a moment. But we both know it'd be a lie. I can't guarantee that I'll still be _me,_ on the other side of that wire. And you can't guarantee you'll believe it even if I am, can you? X6 doesn't say anything, just reaches out and cups his hand around her cheek. It's the first time he's touched her of his own volition for something that wasn't directly medical care, and she leans into it, presses a kiss to the base of his thumb. Closes her eyes against the stupid burn of tears. It's an answer, of a kind. It's just not one that makes anything easier.

Will you at least kiss me, she asks him, her eyes closed. Just once, before I go under. It might be our last chance. Ma'am, X6 says softly, and she opens her eyes again. His whole face is soft and open. No, I know, that was unfair, she says. I shouldn't have- And he shocks her by leaning in, lips parted… to press a kiss to her forehead. I'll be here when you wake up, he murmurs against her hairline. You promise? I promise, he says, and rocks back on his heels. Carefully unbuttons her cuff, then rolls up the sleeve, baring the crook of her elbow. Picks up the hypo, and at her nod, slides the needle into her vein and delivers the sedative. He sets it aside, then rolls down her sleeve, buttons the cuff once more, and wraps his big hand around hers.

She watches his face until she can't anymore, and her eyes eventually slide closed.

###### 

When she wakes up, she knows immediately that it worked. She can hear it in the subsonic hum of the equipment, smell the acrid chemical tang of the activation chems, feel the rush of the air around her. More than that, she can feel the sheer _energy_ coursing through her, the latent potentiality just waiting to explode into movement. She's alive. She's healthy. And she's a fucking courser.

_Ident code S0-13,_ she knows without thinking about it, and almost laughs. Oh, Shaun. Sometimes he's so much his father's son it hurts.

She opens her eyes and sits up, marvelling at the lack of headrush. It takes her a moment to psych herself up, but when she looks around there's X6, sitting in a chair in the far corner of the room. He's watching her, his stern face unreadable, but she can _hear_ his pulse kick up in response. She takes a deep breath and lets it out slow, telling herself that now's no fucking time to be a coward, and holds out her hands.

He stands so fast the chair tips over behind him, but he doesn't even seem to notice. Closes the distance between them in two great strides and grabs her hands with his, and then just stands there, staring at her. His hands are like ice; he must have been sitting there with his hands in fists for _hours,_ to lose circulation like that. She smiles up at him a little helplessly. So, what's the verdict? Not too bad, as faces go, right? I think I kinda miss the cheek scar, but the gray hairs are definitely no great loss-

He cuts her off with his mouth on hers.

Romance might be a new concept but somewhere along the line he definitely learned how to kiss; she happily curls her hands in his collar and kisses back, relief an enormous tidal swell in her heart. And after a bit - she's not paying terribly close attention to the passage of time - something in her says _broadcast protocol installation complete,_ and she _feels_ him, a little ping of her chip knocking against his in the aether. She knows from the fractional start that runs through him that he can feel it too, and _last chance,_ she thinks, but he doesn't move away, just closes his eyes and presses his forehead against hers. And neither of them says anything as the virus does its work, and sets him free.

###### 

**ACT THREE: CONFLAGRATION**

###### 

The final act of the story is about the actual assault on the Institute. Everyone meets up in Sanctuary where PAM is waiting to plan the assault on Nuka-World: the combat-capable synths from Acadia like Chase, Railroad heavies including Deacon, and even some folks from Makerstown, a few mechanics and MacKenzie, who ruefully says she's probably not much use but she'll be there to patch them up, at least. Everyone knows what's at stake and what they need to do, so it's just a matter of figuring out _how._

There are three tasks. First, they need to get in undetected. Second, they need access to as many synths as possible in a short time frame. Third, they need to assault HQ and take out the Directorate - or at least fucking Zimmer; the others might fall in line without him pulling the strings. Sole's confident about the latter part; she practically built that fucking complex, they couldn't keep her out with an army. They kinda _have_ one, Bishop points out: there might be a few rebel coursers like Chase, but most of them serve by choice, everyone knows that. Leave the coursers to me, Sole says, and smiles that shark grin. They won't know what hit 'em.

A sufficient concentration of synths, as it turns out, is not the issue: all synths are quartered in Dry Rock Gulch, which in Sole's day was new-built housing for synth workers and younger scientists, and has subsequently been ghettoized and then turned into a walled prison barracks. Sole isn't any less angry about that than anything else, but she moves past it to the tactical implications: if they can make it through the rest of the park and into the quarters, she can get almost the entire population of synths at once, especially if she goes in the middle of the night.

Which just leaves the problem of getting _to_ the Gulch, which PAM rates their odds as dismal until Bishop raises her hand: she knows the way in. Well, it was a way _out,_ at least for her. Patriot - uh, Dr. Duvall, it got too risky for him to keep using, but it's how she left, all those years ago. A disused drain pipe that used to feed the Northpoint Reservoir, way at the back end of the park. There's still the BioSci hub in between them and the Gulch, but if they skirt along the northwest corridor it's nothing but farmland, and humans never go out there.

With the plan set, all that's left to do is wait: they'll move in tomorrow just after sunset and make their move under the cover of night. Which means that there's one last night for all of them to drink and make merry, for tomorrow they might die.

###### 

It's a hell of a party, of course - the Makerstown contingent trucked in a bunch of food and Sole unearths an old crate of moonshine from the neighbor's root cellar - but there are three quiet moments, as the night wears on. The first is between Bishop and Gage; she's been in the thick of it for most of the night, in her element, and it only slowly dawns on her that Gage isn't anywhere to be found. She eventually finds him on a nearby roof, a purloined bottle of 'shine between his knees, watching the party with a cigarette in his mouth. He doesn't seem too surprised when she clambers up and drops down next to him, though he does give her a token glare when she swipes his bottle and takes a swig. They snipe back and forth for a bit, but ultimately he works around to what he's chewing over: he's been thinking about his own life, choices he made when he was too young to understand what the fuck he was doing. He tells her about Connor, about the lessons he learned there, and it's not like he regrets it, because he doesn't regret a fuckin' thing he ever did to keep himself alive and on top, so don't go thinking he does. But. He nods down at the party, the whole motley crew of them. Looking at everyone come together like this, because they believed or because they care or just because Sole fuckin' asked them to, it's enough to get a man rethinking a few things. _Just_ a few, mind.

Well, buck up, buttercup, she tells him, and slaps him on the back. We still might die tomorrow, and you can go out a happy asshole. You sure got a way of cheerin' a man up, he drawls, but he does look easier. Maybe he just needed to say it to someone, and he knew she'd get it. She wishes she could say she doesn't - she likes to think she learned some different lessons along the way - but she does. G'wan, he tells her, go back to your 'dead' husband, and she rolls her eyes and snaps his eyepatch strap and does, stealing a cigarette out of his pack as she goes. Deacon complains of her tasting like an ashtray when she finds him, but he also starts backing her up to the nearest dark alley between two houses, so she figures he can't mind too much.

###### 

The second moment is between Nick and Sole, as the night is drawing to a close. Nick's checking in on her, making sure she's okay, with the transfer and everything. She kinda hit the ground running, after; didn't really take a moment to stop and process. And maybe Nick's a little thrown, too: the body DiMa made for her looks like she's in her early thirties, a little sharper around the edges and (somewhat) less scarred, missing the familiar crow's feet around her eyes when she smiles. This is a younger Sole, the one DiMa remembers but Nick's never met, someone who went to war but hadn't yet lost a husband or raised a child on her own. It's disorienting, is what it is, and he's not sure how he feels about it - but she's _alive._ God in heaven, she's so lit up with life it makes him dizzy just to look at her. He hadn't realized how tired she'd been by the end, how much the Commonwealth had taken from her, one bite at a time, until she'd become a shadow of herself. It had happened right in front of him, and he never knew.

And maybe that's what eats at him most of all, as he watches throw her head back and laugh; the not noticing. But he bites it back and only smiles as she tells him: Nick, I feel _amazing,_ I feel like I could take on the world. Well, maybe start with just one corner of it, he tells her, his old mechanical heart aching, and she laughs again and ducks in to press a kiss to his cheek, just above the missing patch, brief and warm against his false skin. No promises, she whispers in his ear, then allows herself to be tugged away and swept back up in the dancing. Nick watches X6 on the edge of the crowd, watching her with something that might even have been a smile softening the harsh planes of his face, and mentally wishes the poor bastard the very best of luck before he heads off to smoke in peace.

###### 

The final moment is between Sole and X6. She's finally retreated from the dregs of the party, commander's duty discharged, and she's sitting in her garage, smoking and staring at the empty space where her old bike used to sit. Nate had built this garage for her as a housewarming present, over the righteous fury of the HOA president who'd argued _strenuously_ that the bylaws only allowed for open parking bays, no enclosed structures. Sole had actually been the one to smooth that one over: _my wife the diplomat_ , Nate had teased her, because what she'd actually done was go over with a six-pack and the box of medals they'd finally seen fit to ship over from Hagen and had cheerfully started telling him the unredacted version of how she'd earned them. Two beers and three medals deep and he'd been _more_ than happy to agree that Nate's interpretation of the bylaws was entirely reasonable, and she'd gotten her goddamn garage.

It's empty now, of course. She'd kept a bike here for quite a while after she came out of cryo; a pair of bikes, actually, because Conrad had been fucking insufferable riding bitch and she'd finally given up and fixed him up a spare. She hasn't been back here since he and Nate died. She's turning over the fact that the thought doesn't make her wish she died down there with them anymore when she sees a shadow fall over her, and looks up to see X6 waiting in the doorway. All partied out? she teases, and he raises an eyebrow at her as he steps in and closes the door behind him. Just checking in; your conversation with Valentine earlier looked… intense. He just wanted to make sure I'm okay, she says, with my new body and all. And are you? Well, I don't know, she drawls - leaning back on her hands, watching his gaze follow the arch of her back. I _feel_ pretty great, but I haven't really tested it yet, y'know? DiMa loaded me up with combat mods, all the latest and greatest, but who _knows_ if I'm good enough to go against a _real_ courser.

Concerning, he agrees calmly; she can see a smile starting at the corners of his eyes, because his shades are nowhere to be seen. Tomorrow will be dangerous; you should be prepared. I _should,_ she agrees, tongue firmly in cheek. If only there was a courser who could help me test it. I suppose I could get Chase, he says, not-smiling like a motherfucker, and she laughs and sits up and throws a folding baton she'd set aside for this exact purpose at his head. Ditch the coat, asshole, and let's see what you've got. He catches the baton with no discernable effort, though she can feel the strength in her arm and knows it would have lodged straight into the metal wall of the garage if it had hit, and deliberately shrugs out of his coat, folding it carefully and setting it aside without his gaze ever leaving hers. She grins and follows suit, stripping out of her duster and flannel, leaving her in just a thin undershirt, sweat gleaming at the hollow of her throat. They both snap out their batons and start circling each other, and the faint shift of muscles under his tight thermal shirt is all the warning she gets before he attacks.

The first round she takes with ease; she got the measure of him in combat against the raiders, whereas he's not used to her new reflexes. He adjusts quickly, though, and takes the second round with a nasty little twist that would have dislocated her shoulder if she still had human joints. The third round is a long one, and they lose the batons somewhere in the middle and it's just bare hands and grappling, where he should have the advantage of size but she's so fast, she's _so fucking fast now_ and when it's done he's facedown on the cement with her kneeling between his shoulderblades, one arm twisted up behind him and her hand gripping the back of his neck like she's ready to snap it. He goes still and the sound of their panting fills the garage, and she's aware of every inch where they're touching, the heat and size of him underneath of her, the wild joy taking wing in her heart.

Best three out of five? she offers, a laugh trembling in her voice, and he growls and rolls them over and that's the last talking they do for quite some time.

###### 

The next night they make it inside the park without incident, and nobody is more surprised than Bishop when everything goes more or less according to plan. There is one tense moment when they get caught by a group of farm synths - apparently BioSci has pushed everyone to a full 24 rotation, whoops - but Chase, of all people, is the one to defuse it. Apparently she'd let one of the farmers slide on some violation a little ways before she escaped herself, and SRB kept it on lockdown and tried to make it look like she'd died on a mission but the farmer always knew better. Chase introduces Sole - they're low enough level that they wouldn't recognize her on sight - and she crowds in close, letting the virus do its work.

They don't believe it at first, until one, quieter but braver than the others, whispers their recall code, and nothing happens. Then another one does it, and the one after that, and by the time they reach Dry Rock Gulch they've acquired quite a following of freed synths, trailing in their wake like the Pied Piper. Sole and X6 leave the followers at the gate and work their way through the limited security with brutal efficiency. When it's done and there's an awed crowd forming, she wades into the middle. She bends her head, feeling the ping-ping-ping of dozens of chips receiving the data packet, and is surprised to realize that her cheeks are wet with tears.

###### 

All that's left now is to confront the Directorate directly. Their squad splits up: Chase and most of the other fighters escorting Tinker Tom and the Makerstown gearheads up to the power station, while Sole leads her squad into the park tunnels and up to the sublevels of HQ, formerly known as Fizztop Mountain. The park tunnels are all but forgotten now, sealed off and ignored unless there's a mechanical issue, and it means that no one is expecting them when the power suddenly cuts out and they blow into the complex like a radstorm.

Most of the coursers are quartered up at SRB headquarters in the Galactic Zone, too far away to respond in any kind of time, but there's always some on patrol, especially in HQ. There's a few of them who surrender, but most of them fight back with everything they've got, even when she's close enough to ping their chip. Coursers were always the ones who served by choice, and they don't give up so easily. Sole and X6 cut them down, too, though she sees X6 getting grimmer and grimmer with each victory and in a rare moment to pause and catch their breath she puts a hand to his shoulder in silent comfort. He nods at her, straightens, and moves out again, gun at the ready.

At the top of the Mountain Bishop and Gage drop back to hold the stairwell, while Sole and X6 move on to the boardroom, a big glass-walled room where the restaurant used to be. There's one final courser on the door, about as panicked as a courser can look under the flashing emergency lights but already raising her weapon to aim, and X6 drops her calmly with one well-aimed shot as Sole hits the double-doors with both hands and throws them open.

Inside the directorate are huddled in their chairs - and in at least one case, under the table - but at the head of the table, one man sits unmoving, accompanied by a dark-haired woman with a lab coat and clipboard. Sole's heart lurches unevenly in her chest - oh, Jesus, he's gotten so _old,_ he looks like her fucking _father,_ oh jesus christ fuck me - but she knows that face, knows those eyes, that perfectly straight way he holds himself in his seat. Shaun. Her baby. She's not too late.

The lights flick back on.

_Hello, mother,_ Shaun says calmly, as Curie cries _Madame!_ Hey kids, Sole says back, and without looking she aims Conrad's pistol back and to the side at one of the scientists who's reaching slowly under the table. Yeah, I wouldn't do that if I were you.

The scientist slowly puts his hands up, and she rotates in place, a fiendish smile spreading across her face. Well hello there, Zimmer. Long time no see. Commander, he says calmly. This is unexpected. You're tellin' _me,_ she says, and starts a slow stroll around the table, while X6 falls into parade rest at the door. Gotta admit, I wasn't really expecting to wake up again. Guess you weren't either, or you would never have been so stupid as to fuck with what's mine. What _do_ you hope to accomplish with this unseemly display, he starts, sounding irritated, and then Sole, having just arrived in arm's reach, pistol-whips him right across his wrinkled face. My fucking _son,_ you mealy little _fuck!_ she snarls. Bad enough you made slaves out of _my_ people, but you had to lay hands on my _son_ to do it? Did you really think I'd let that stand?

You could hear a pin drop in the room now, and Sole tosses a lock of hair out of her eyes, looks away from where Zimmer is holding his jaw in his white-knuckled hand and looks around the table. Look at all of you, she says quietly. Sitting pretty up here in your little glass box, looking down on everyone else. Were any of you even _alive,_ when the Institute fell? Do any of you know what the Collective is _for_? I made a place where everyone would be _safe,_ do you understand that? Where we could work together to make the world a _better fucking place._ People _died_ for that. _My husband_ died for that! And now you think synths are the tools to keep the Collective safe? The synths _are_ the Collective, you idiot children. She raises her gun: and _this_ is the tool that keeps the Collective safe. And so saying, she turns and puts a bullet through Zimmer's brain.

Someone cries out; someone else claps their hands over their mouth. There's a faint wet noise as his brain matter starts to drip from the wall, and then a retching noise from elsewhere around the table. The faint odor of urine rises up past the reek of fresh blood. Sole paces up to the head of the table, casts one last look at the horrified assembly, and says _here endeth the lesson,_ before she turns to Shaun. He hasn't moved at all, though Curie is clinging to his shoulder, her eyes wide and shock stamped across her pretty face.

Director, Sole says calmly. What are your orders?

He studies her with equal calmness for a moment, something that might have been a smile forming at the corners of his eyes. I believe you might stand down now, Commander, he murmurs, and she nods sharply and clicks the safety on her pistol, sets it on the table in front of him. He rests two fingers on the initials carved there, and then looks up to where she's standing next to him, waiting in parade rest. He rises smoothly, pushing his chair behind him, and then wraps his arms around her shoulders and draws her into an embrace. _Mom,_ he says, his voice cracking, and she grabs him back with equal fervency, careful of her new strength, burying his face in the curve of her neck. _You did it baby,_ she murmurs in his ear; _You saved me, you saved them all, you did so good._ She looks over his shoulder to where X6 is watching them both. He looks back at her, his stern face unsmiling, and then raises a fist and presses it to his heart.

###### 

**EPILOGUE: FROM THE ASHES**

###### 

Some months later, Nick's visiting from the Commonwealth, riding in with a trade caravan on Market Day. He chats with some of the other travellers, collecting stories like he always does, and finds himself in conversation with a couple of traders from a settlement north of there - Sanctuary, had he ever heard of it? The last of the Minutemen settled in up there, making a real nice home for themselves. Oh, Nick hadn't heard anyone survived, after Quincy. Yeah, apparently some folks from the Collective came by and rescued the last of them, got them set up in Sanctuary. Real nice place - safe, secure. The kind of place you could raise a family. That's why they're up here today, hoping to do some trade and say thanks. I doubt they were looking for thanks, Nick says wryly. But the trade's probably appreciated.

In Transit Town, Nick wanders here and there through the stalls for a while, until he's stopped by a stone-faced courser. The courser directs him to the train station, where he rides across to the park along with a small jumble of synths, cheerful and sunburnt and boasting over their trade deals, eyeing him a little sidelong. At the other station he's met by another courser, who leads him through the town and down to - Nick has to laugh - the maintenance tunnels, where Sole is wrist-deep in some machine or other. My, my, how times don't change, he drawls, and she lights up gratifyingly to see him. She comes in for a hug and he ducks hastily away, protesting that his coat is messed up enough without her getting engine grease all over it. She looks down at her black-smeared hands like they belong to someone else, then grins sheepishly and pushes a lock of hair out of her eyes, incidentally adding a smear of grease to the collection on her face. Oh, yeah. Should probably clean up, huh?

Freshly scrubbed and damp behind the ears, she leads him around town, pointing out the various buildings, administration and medical and so on. Everywhere he looks he sees humans and synths mingling - uneasily, but they're mingling, and some of 'em he can't actually tell which are which. Near the end of the tour a guy in sunglasses comes by to let her know the Director is looking for her, and Nick squints after him as he leaves, fighting the sense of familiarity. Yeah, you get used to that, Sole sighs, the dude's freakin' Where's Waldo, and she leads him to the last stop on their tour: Bradberton's former office, which she's taken over as her own. Officially, she's the head of the SRB again; unofficially, she's planning on handing off the reins to Bishop, at least if she and Gage don't kill each other first.

And it turns out there's another reason she took this as her office: apparently there's a visitor from the Capitol who managed to finish the Cappy hunt, and Sole's been using the secret lab they found underneath to build a new relay platform. Apparently there was a power source down here - Nick recognizes the signs of Sole not giving him the full story and resolves to follow up on that later - something that's big enough to run the system for a century. At some point this will just be a transport hub, just like the train station at the front. But no matter what happens, they're never closing themselves off again. Not as long as she has anything to say about it.

Near the relay platform, X6 is observing a three-way argument between Tinker Tom, a young woman in jeans and flannel and shorn dark hair that Nick only belatedly recognizes as Curie, and a tall, composed young man Nick doesn't recognize at all until he speaks with Shaun's voice. Obviously Shaun chose to follow in his mother's footsteps in more ways than one: the synth in front of him looks about thirty years younger than the tired old man from the coup, his hair a rich coppery red and his face unlined. They look more like siblings, standing next to each other, than parent and child, which curiously hadn't been true the _last_ time Shaun had been thirty - but with a jolt, Nick realizes that they're actually the same age, now, or near enough. Shaun might actually be a couple years older, if he's getting his math right.

The resemblance is also probably helped along by the fact that Shaun, like Curie, is dressed for the road instead of in a lab coat. Apparently, Sole and X6 are taking him and Curie to Acadia. After years of partnership, he and DiMa are going to meet for the very first time, and try to figure out a way to solve the memory storage issue. Nick shakes his head when Sole cuts him a sideways look: maybe someday he'll change his mind, but he hasn't seen that perfect recall is doing his brother any favors, and he's doing well enough as it is. He still remembers the things that matter. Sole's smile softens, and she changes the subject, joking that she hopes Faraday doesn't try to kill her kid. Nick jokes back that between her and X6, they should be able to handle one jealous scientist, and she looks over at X6, something tender in her expression. And though she doesn't make a sound, X6 looks up at her, lips curving up in an answering faint smile.

Yeah, Sole says. I think we make a pretty good team.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm [sorrelchestnut on tumblr, come say hi!](https://sorrelchestnut.tumblr.com/)


End file.
